The Democratic Sublime: On Aesthetics

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The Democratic Sublime
The Democratic Sublime
On Aesthetics and Popular Assembly

JA S O N F R A N K

1
 3
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Names: Frank, Jason A., author.
Title: The democratic sublime : on aesthetics and popular assembly / Jason Frank.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020044732 (print) | LCCN 2020044733 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190658151 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190658168 (paperback) |
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Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—Philosophy | Democracy—History—19th century. |
Aesthetics—Political aspects. | History, Modern—19th century.
Classification: LCC JC423 .F7468 2021 (print) | LCC JC423 (ebook) |
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DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190658151.001.0001

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For J. Peter Euben
1939–​2018
Democratic peoples can be very amused for a moment by con-
sidering nature; but they get really excited only by the sight of
themselves.
—​Alexis de Tocqueville
 Contents

Preface: The Beautiful Revolution ix

Acknowledgments  xv

Introduction: Beyond Democracy’s Imaginary Investments  1

1. Popular Manifestation  19
2. Rousseau’s Silent Assemblies  41
3. The Living Image of the People  69
4. Delightful Horror  97
5. The Poetics of the Barricade  123
6. Tocqueville’s Religious Terror  153
Afterword: Democratic Appearance  181

Notes  205
Index  243
 Preface: The Beautiful Revolution

The spirit of the people speaks to [democrats] through the ballot box as the
god of the prophet Ezekiel spoke to the marrowless bones.
—​Karl Marx

In a series of articles written for the Neue Rhenische Zeitung in 1850, later
published by Friedrich Engels as The Class Struggles in France, Karl Marx
looked back on the failed French revolution of 1848 and attempted to ex-
plain how the democratic aspirations that inspired the February assault on
the July Monarchy—​and promised to fulfill the dashed hopes of 1789, 1792,
and 1830—​also led to its termination in the reactionary popular dictator-
ship of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Popular sovereignty, which had so often
defined the emancipatory visions of two generations of radical activists and
thinkers, was now not only an obstacle to genuine emancipation, but a ple-
biscitary source of power for newly emergent forms of political domination.
Bonapartism became, for Marx, an important way of understanding the com-
plex internal dynamics of popular—​and later “populist”—​authoritarianism.
It is an analysis that continues to resonate powerfully today.
The national enthusiasm that propelled the revolution forward, and which
quickly overturned the hated regime of Louis Phillippe, had successfully es-
tablished for the first time in history a parliamentary republic based in uni-
versal male suffrage. The Second Republic’s provisional government was
immediately thrown into a legitimation crisis, however, by the underlying
sectional, parliamentary, and class conflicts lurking beneath its illusory foun-
dation in the people’s unitary will. When the popular classes of Paris returned
to the barricades in June to protest the conservative government’s closure of
the National Workshops—​and to convert the political revolution into a so-
cial revolution based in the “right to work”—​they were abandoned by their
fellow citizens and thousands were massacred in the streets by Cavaignac’s
National Guard. The “fantastic republic” built around the pretensions of na-
tional unity, Marx proclaimed, quickly “dissolved in powder and smoke.”1
x PREFACE

Tocqueville described the June days as a “slave’s war,” and in its aftermath the
Party of Order quickly consolidated its power against any furthering of revo-
lutionary aspiration.2
Looking back on these terrible events, Marx would write that “The
February revolution was the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal
sympathy, because conflicts which erupted against the monarchy slumbered
harmoniously side by side, as yet undeveloped, because the social struggle
which formed its background had only assumed an airy existence—​it existed
only as a phrase, only as words. The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the
repulsive revolution, because realities have taken the place of words, because
the republic has uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the
protective, concealing crown.”3
As he would vividly elaborate in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, Marx saw the February revolution as a farcical restaging of earlier
revolutionary events. Although the revolutionaries successfully overturned a
bourgeois monarchy and established a democratic republic in its place, they
remained nonetheless captivated by the king’s “concealing crown,” now in the
fantastic form of national unity, the “magnanimous intoxication of brother-
hood,” and the people’s indestructible sovereign will.4 Under the slogan of
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Marx would write, “all classes of French society
were suddenly propelled into the arena of political power; they were forced
to quit their boxes, the pit, the gallery and act for themselves on the revo-
lutionary stage.”5 The February revolution drew its “illusions, its poetry, its
imaginary content, and its phrases” first and foremost from the inheritance
of democratic revolutions past.6 It was a beautiful fantasy because it staged
a spectacle of courageously heroic but harmonious concord—​a triumphant
reiteration of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People against the forces of mo-
narchical absolutism—​but it was also a lie because it was premised on “the
imaginary abolition of class relations.”7 In a capitalist society, everything in
the socio-​political world that is experienced as beautiful is a lie, because it
conceals the repulsive reality of class domination and exploitation on which
that society is based.
Marx would argue that, during its historical apotheosis in the revolutions
of 1848, democracy was itself ultimately exposed as the most beautiful, cap-
tivating, and destructive of illusions. In sharp contrast with antipolitical uto-
pian socialists like Saint-​Simon, Fourier, or Proudhon, Marx had himself
embraced the radical potential of democracy as an “instrument of lower-​class
revolutionary agency,” but his analysis of the events following 1848 led him
 PREFACE xi

to revise his earlier position.8 While the “cult of the people” had once had the
historical efficacy and enlivening spirit to move the masses to emancipatory
collective action—​if once it had “served the purpose of glorifying the new
struggles” and “magnifying the given task in the imagination”—​these once
“inexhaustible resources” were now taken up to support the forces of the
most desperate reaction.9 The people, once the propulsive spirit and agent
of revolutionary change, had now become an enervating ghost, a socially
disembodied abstraction that authorized the destruction of the very polit-
ical institutions that governed in their name.10 Reactionary anti-​democrats
had long proclaimed the idea of the people acting collectively outside of the
authorized institutions of the state to be a phantom, a chimera, a ghost—​
to place one’s faith in the people’s sovereignty, Joseph de Maistre declared,
was to believe in the “fecundity of nothingness.”11 In his De la Démocratie en
France, Guizot had argued that “idolâlatrie démocratique” was the source of
all of France’s political ills.12 After 1848, Marx mobilized these tropes against
democrats, but he did so from the radical Left.
The direct incarnation of the people’s sovereign will, which for half a cen-
tury had been what Pierre Rosanvallon describes as the rallying cry of the
“radical project of a self-​instituted society,” now became a political theology
of Bonapartist reaction.13 “Against the National Assembly,” Marx wrote,
“the constitutionally organized expression of the people,” the Party of Order
“led into the attack the unorganized masses. . . . They taught Bonaparte to
appeal from parliamentary assemblies to the people.”14 The people’s con-
stituent power was thereby co-​opted as a tool of reactionary dictatorship.
With Bonaparte’s 1852 coup, Marx conceded that “universal suffrage seems
to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may
make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare
in the name of the people itself: ‘All that comes to birth is fit for overthrow, as
nothing worth.’ ”15
If modern democracy emerged as a potent political force out of the histor-
ical cauldron of class struggle, it would now have to be overcome as a result
of those same struggles. To think that democracy was itself the goal was a
“cretinism,” Marx argued, which “confines its victims to an imaginary world
and robs them of their senses, their recollection, all knowledge of the rude
external world.”16 Auguste Blanqui, the nineteenth-​century master of “the
art of insurrection,” would similarly remark upon hearing of Bonaparte’s
coup, “what then, I beg you, is a democrat? It is a vague, banal word, without
precise meaning, a word made of rubber. . . . What opinion would not
xii PREFACE

accommodate itself under this sign? Everyone claims to be a democrat, espe-

cially aristocrats.”17
This book excavates the lost radicalism of democracy in the half century
before Marx proclaimed its “reckless voluntarism” a fantasy that needed to
be dispelled in the name of true collective emancipation. “The principle of
politics,” Marx would write of Jean-​Jacques Rousseau and what he ultimately
considered Rousseau’s baleful influence on an earlier generation of radical
democratic revolutionaries, “is the will. The more one-​sided and thus the
more perfected political thought is, the more it believes in the omnipotence of
the will.”18 For Marx, democracy’s affirmation of the people’s transformative
power led both to a shallow understanding of the structural underpinnings
of social ills and ultimately to a naïve faith that those ills could be meaning-
fully rectified through political action.
Most contemporary radical democratic theory, with its preoccupations
with constituent power, the paradoxes of peoplehood, and historical dy-
namics of peopling, objects for theoretical and historical reasons to Marx’s
pronouncements about the emancipatory inefficacy of “the cult of the
people,” and rejects his confident materialist dismissal of such myths, fables,
and fantasies. As Warren Breckman has recently demonstrated, a signature
move of “post-​Marxism” and its recovery of the political has been to replace
the sociological essentialism of class with the symbolic constructivism of the
people.19 Ernesto Laclau, the preeminent exemplar of this theoretical rea-
lignment on the Left, has argued that the reinstatement of “the people” as
the preeminent political category—​indeed, the “royal road to understanding
something about the ontological condition of the political as such”20—​is es-
sential for the constitution of a unitary political actor out of the radical het-
erogeneity of competing social demands. The people, he writes, “helps to
present other categories—​such as class—​for what they are: contingent and
particular forms of articulating demands, not an ultimate core from which
the nature of the demands themselves could be explained.”21
I share some of this radical democratic skepticism about the sociological
essentialism of class and some of its relative optimism about the political
productivity of popular “articulation,” but I also reject the linguistic or semi-
otic fundamentalism on which so much contemporary radical democratic
theory—​first and foremost Laclau’s—​is based. There is a resistant kernel of
concrete materialism in the aesthetics of peoplehood I develop in this book
and its distinct mode of democratic representation in the form of the popular
assembly. There is, of course, a long tradition of theoretical reflection on the
 PREFACE xiii

radical productivity of political imagination and myth within the broader

traditions of Marxism itself, from Georges Sorel to Walter Benjamin to Franz
Fanon, and this book draws inspiration from that tradition.
In his writings on the revolutions of 1848, Marx was attuned to three
questions that I explore at length in the pages that follow: the remarkable
but frequently disavowed reliance of democratic politics on eliciting the
imaginary investments of its citizens; the aesthetic contours that give those
investments their liveliness and power; and the role of “the unorganized
masses”—​what I will simply call the politics of popular assembly—​as a dis-
tinctively potent form of democratic representation beyond democracy’s im-
aginary investments. I follow Marx’s lead on these questions, but with the
hopes of neither exorcising the democratic ghost nor consigning it to the
dustbin of history. While Marx asserted the entwinement of democracy
and fantasy, the people and aesthetics, in order to dispel the enchantment
of their radical pretensions, I will take up these same dimensions of demo-
cratic politics to recover a vision of democracy’s radicalism too often buried
under the weight of its platitudes and historical “banalization.”22 Before de-
mocracy hardened into a conception of universal suffrage in 1848, it had a
much wider—​and more threatening—​range of associations. For much of the
first half of the nineteenth century, as Mark Philp has written, “democracy
connoted not so much a specific institutional order as a cluster of political
phenomena: crowd activity; popular pressure on government; demagogues
bidding for crowd support; impulsive politics . . . and in general tumult and
instability.”23
This book recovers democracy’s dormant or “sleeping” radicalism in the
figure of the democratic sublime and does so, in part, by excavating the
observations and insights of some of its most trenchant critics.24 “The prin-
ciple of the sovereignty of the people is so dangerous,” de Maistre wrote,
“that, even if it were true, it would be necessary to conceal it.”25 The task of
recovery is not antiquarian, in other words, but engaged with some of the
central preoccupations of contemporary democratic theory—​the politics of
peopling and of popular constituent power—​as well as with what I consider
its blind spots—​the aesthetic contours of democratic representation and the
surprisingly persistent power of the politics of popular assembly.
With democracy once again in crisis, and many predicting its demise, there
may be some value in connecting the popular eruptions now defensively
enacted in its name—​whether wearing yellow vests in the streets of Paris, be-
coming “like water” in the squares of Hong Kong, or demanding that “every
xiv PREFACE

vote count” in the United States—​with democracy’s longer history of popular

manifestation. In order to understand the persistence of popular assembly
as a distinctive—​and distinctively powerful—​mode of democratic represen-
tation, I return to some central but largely forgotten dilemmas that attended
democracy’s modern emergence. In looking back at the history of the ubiq-
uitous figure of “the sublime people” from an earlier age, we may come to
glimpse our own time of democratic crisis in a new light. Democracy will
appear here as neither a self-​evident norm nor a ruse and deception, neither
a universal aspiration nor an empty platitude. Democracy is an enigmatic
concept and practice, the history of which conveys dilemmas that we must
continue to wrestle with concerning the very foundations of our political life.
 Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the comments and questions of so many
friends and colleagues in the far-​flung world of political theory that it is hard
to know where to begin these acknowledgments. Closest to home, Cornell
remains a stimulating place to think and work, and I am grateful to the gen-
erous colleagues who have discussed the ideas in this book with me, in-
cluding Richard Bensel, Susan Buck-​Morss, Paul Fleming, Jill Frank, Alex
Livingston, Tracy McNulty, Aziz Rana, Camille Robcis, Neil Saccamano,
and Sid Tarrow. A special thanks to Patchen Markell, who offered probing
and insightful comments on most of the manuscript. The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation’s John E. Sawyer Seminar on “The Political Will” brought to-
gether a terrific group of scholars to discuss topics close to the heart of this
book, and I am grateful to all of them. The political theory graduate students
at Cornell remain a source of inspiration. Special thanks to the participants
in my seminar on “Political Theory and Aesthetics,” and to Nolan Bennett,
Kevin Duong, Mike Gorup, Nazli Konya, and Ed Quish. I will never stop
learning from Isaac Kramnick, who passed away before this book was fin-
ished. I miss him dearly.
Each chapter of this book was presented at different conferences and
workshops, and I appreciate the invitations and the comments I received
on those occasions. Portions of the Introduction were delivered at the
“Democratic Interpellations” conference at UC Santa Cruz, and a con-
densed version was published in a roundtable on “Figurative Publics” at the
Immanent Frame. Many thanks to all of the conference participants and es-
pecially to Banu Bargu, Nusrat Chowdhury, Mona Oraby, and Max Tomba.
Portions of Chapter 1 were presented at the “Images of Sovereignty” con-
ference at KU Leuven, CUNY’s Committee on Globalization and Social
Change, A Night of Philosophy and Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library, the
Society for the Humanities Annual Invitational Lecture at Cornell, the Duke
Graduate Student Conference in Political Theory, the “People, Constituent
Power, and Revolution” conference at Uppsala University, and the University
of Copenhagen. I would especially like to thank Michael Hardt, Stefan
Jonsson, Andreas Kalyvas, Bas Leijssenaar, Sofia Nasström, Lars Tøender,
xvi Acknowledgments

Dimitris Vardoulakis, Miguel Vatter, Neil Walker, and Gary Wilder for their
comments. An earlier version of “The People as Popular Manifestation” was
published in Bas Leijssenaar and Neil Walker, eds., Sovereignty in Action
(Cambridge University Press, 2019). Chapter 2 was presented to Stanford’s
Seminar on the History of Political Thought and the Research Seminar on
Political Philosophy at KU Leuven. Special thanks to Keith Baker, Çiğdem
Çıdam, Joshua Dienstag, Boris Litvin, Alison McQueen, Bernie Meylar,
Stefan Rummens, and Nora Timmermans for their comments.
Earlier versions of “The Living Image of the People” were presented at
the Remarque Institute’s 2015 Kandersteg Seminar on “Sovereignty” and
published in Theory & Event 18, no. 1 (2015) and in Zvi Ben-​Dor, Stefanos
Geroulanos, and Nicole Jerr, eds., The Scaffolding of Sovereignty (Columbia
University Press, 2017). Special thanks to Jodi Dean, Stefanos Geroulanos,
Davide Panagia, and all of the Kanderstag participants for their comments.
“Delightful Horror” was presented to audiences at Trinity College,
Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, the New School
for Social Research, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Cornell
University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. An earlier version
was published in Nikolis Kompridis, ed., Political Theory’s Aesthetic Turn
(Bloomsbury, 2014). Special thanks to Jeffrey Greene, Nick Kompridis, Lida
Maxwell, André Munro, Ella Myers, Anne Norton, Thea Riafrancos, Kyong-​
Min Son, Rebekah Sterling, and Stephen White. Sections from Chapter 6
were presented at the annual Conference for the Study of Political Thought
at Yale, the CUNY Graduate Center, Columbia University, Brown University,
University of California, Berkeley, Hunter College, and the Political Concepts
conference. Many thanks to Wendy Brown, Bryan Garsten, Alex Gourevitch,
Kinch Hoekstra, Karuna Mantena, Robyn Marasco, Uday Mehta, Corey
Robin, Melvin Rogers, Josh Simon, and Nadia Urbinati. The afterword on
Jacques Rancière’s political aesthetics was presented at Northwestern’s
Rhetoric and Public Culture Summer Institute and an earlier version was
published in Dilip P. Gaonkar and Scott Durham, eds., Distributions of the
Sensible: Rancière, Between Aesthetics and Politics (Northwestern University
Press, 2019). Many thanks to Dilip Gaonkar, Scott Durham, and to the
people and institutions who granted permissions to reproduce the Glenn
Ligon images discussed there.
In addition to the many friends and colleagues already listed, I would like
to thank four political theorists whose friendship and conversation have
improved this book in many ways: Cristina Beltran, Bonnie Honig, Lori
 Acknowledgments xvii

Marso, and George Shulman. Tracy Strong read the entire manuscript and
offered encouraging and helpful suggestions for revision. Thanks to him
and to an anonymous reader at Oxford University Press. Will Cameron pro-
vided invaluable help in the book’s final stages. Angela Chnapko has been a
wonderful and supportive editor with whom to work, and I am delighted to
have this book included in the exciting political theory list she is building at
Oxford University Press.
Peter Euben was the teacher who inspired my interest in political theory
and who first provoked in me deeper reflections on what we talk about when
we talk about democracy. Peter was a mentor, an inspiring example, and a
dear friend. May his memory be a blessing. This book is dedicated to him.
 Introduction
Beyond Democracy’s Imaginary Investments

When collective protest develops in the streets and occupied

squares, it becomes not simply a demand for democracy addressed
to the disputed power but an affirmation of democracy effectively
implemented.
—​Jacques Rancière

I.

As another cycle of collective protest reverberated around the globe in re-

cent years, crowds again took to the streets and public squares of cities from
Santiago to Beirut, from Hong Kong to Baghdad, claiming their elected rep-
resentatives do not, in fact, represent them. In the United States, the largest
protest movement in its history—​the Movement for Black Lives—​drew be-
tween fifteen to twenty-​six million people into the streets of hundreds of
different cities and towns, and did so in the middle of a global pandemic’s
demand for social distancing. The local grievances which triggered these
uprisings vary widely—​an increase in the price of public transportation, a tax
on a popular messaging service, a revised extradition law, searing examples
of racist police violence—​but all express dismay and disgust at the economic
and political inequalities of the existing system of representative government
and a common demand to return political power to the people themselves.
“Our government is a government of thugs!” “Chile woke up!” “There are
no rioters, only a tyrannical regime!” The figurative space opened up by a
widespread crisis of democratic legitimacy once again filled the streets with
multitudes banging pots and pans, occupying public buildings and squares,
building barricades, and throwing improvised dance parties celebrating the
coming fall of the regime. Amid the proliferation of ever-​new technologies
enabling virtual forms of assembly, political participation, and “preference

The Democratic Sublime. Jason Frank, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190658151.003.0001
2 Introduction

aggregation,” the physical assemblage of popular collectives in public space

has retained a distinctive and undeniable power.
Insurgent appeals to the authority of the people in the form of crowds,
demonstrations, popular assemblies, and gatherings of “the people out
of doors” have been a recurrent and distinguishing feature of modern
democratic history since the eighteenth-​century “Age of the Democratic
Revolution.”1 The reiteration of such collective manifestations across a wide
array of histories and geographies demonstrates their centrality to the dem-
ocratic political imaginary, but they have never received the full theoretical
attention they deserve. In this book I attempt to remedy this by offering his-
torical and theoretical reflections on the enchantments of democracy, the
sustaining fictions that enable it and give it life, as well as the collective phe-
nomena that point beyond those fictions while never fully dispelling their
allure; this book offers a study of the democratic sublime.
This is a difficult task, in part, because democracy has for so long been
associated with the disenchantments of the modern age. The overthrow of
monarchal rule during the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century
involved a simultaneous rejection of the mystifying pomp and ritualized
power of royalism, which, in the words of Catharine Macaulay, “blinded the
people with the splendor of dazzling images.”2 If the king’s passive subjects
were an “image doting rabble,” democracy’s active citizens were a ratio-​
critical public.3 Democracy’s iconoclastic disenchantments have been loudly
proclaimed by its most eloquent critics and its most ardent admirers, from
the late eighteenth century up to the present day.4
Edmund Burke was among the first and most influential of modern
democracy’s critics. He warned that democracy would tear off “the decent
drapery of life,” destroy the “pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and
obedience liberal,” and leave nothing to authority but the sheer force of num-
bers and the threat of majoritarian violence;5 for Burke, democracy was “the
most shameless thing in the world.”6 His nemesis Thomas Paine, the revolu-
tionary citizen of the world, agreed that democracy would finally dispel the
“dark coverings” and “superstitious tales” sustaining royal power—​exposing
the “government of kings” to be “the most prosperous invention the Devil
ever set on foot for the promotion of idolatry”—​but he argued that doing
so would finally establish a government of the living, and not of the dead.7
Democracy promised a politics finally disenthralled of “Aaron’s molten calf,
or Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image,” and attuned to the “simple voice of na-
ture” and the natural rights of man.8
 Introduction 3

In the place of obscurity, there would be transparency; in the place of

mysticism, rational clarity; in the place of secrecy, public accountability.
Democracy would ultimately be proclaimed the political face of enlight-
enment itself, the collective process through which citizens could free
themselves from their “self-​incurred tutelage” and achieve their collective
autonomy.9 As Marcel Gauchet has described it, democracy became the
driving force of modern “autonomization.”10
Following this familiar view, democratic theorists have often emphasized
the skills, virtues, and capacities citizens must acquire in order to assume the
responsibilities of their political empowerment.11 The autonomous and self-​
governing people that is the source of democratic legitimacy must themselves
be formed, disciplined, and trained into the capacity for collective self-​rule.
Alexis de Tocqueville focused so much attention on the Puritan townships
and the different forms of civic association in Democracy in America because
he believed they were schools of democracy that “bring [liberty] within the
people’s reach,” and teach them “how to use and how to enjoy it”; associations
provided democratic citizens with the necessary training in the difficult “art
of freedom.”12 Countless others, from John Stuart Mill to Hannah Arendt,
John Dewey to Robert Putnam, have followed Tocqueville in detailing
how democracy enlists, enables, and interpolates the practices, habits, and
dispositions crucial for its own maintenance and survival.
While these interrelated questions of democratic disenchantment
and political education have been central preoccupations of democratic
theorists, they have less often considered in any depth or detail how democ-
racy must also enlist the imagination of its citizens as an ongoing condi-
tion of its existence, and certainly as a condition of its radicalization and
deepening.13 Not just enlightenment and education, in other words, but
entirely new forms of political enchantment are required by democratic
politics. Democracy places new pressures on the collective imagination,
unprecedented enticements of collective fantasy. At the heart of modern
democracy’s fantasy space lies its enigmatic constituent subject: the people.
Unlike the king standing at the center of royalism’s political cosmology—​“a
visible presence, wearing his crown and carrying his scepter”—​the people
that are the living source of democratic authority are never visible; the sov-
ereign voice proclaimed in the revolutionary slogan vox populi, vox dei is
never distinctly audible.14
In the medieval political theology of the King’s Two Bodies explored by
Ernst Kantorowicz, there was both the living natural body of the king, subject
4 Introduction

to illness and to death, and the political body of the realm, invisible and ev-
erlasting.15 The king does not die, but “deceases” when his natural body is
separated from the corpus mysticum of the state. In democracy, “the people,”
as Remo Bodei has written, “do not enjoy the privilege of correspondence
between the physical and the political body, however temporary.” To support
the authority of the sovereign people, “a massive and repeated symbolic in-
vestment is necessary.”16 The conjoining of the people’s two bodies therefore
requires a double investment of the popular imagination. It must envision
both their concrete material existence as well as their continuous persistence
across time.
In order to attribute sovereign authority to the people, we have to imagine
the contours and composition of their existence—​the dilemmas of boundary
associated with who the people are—​as well as their capacity for transform-
ative collective agency—​the less frequently engaged but related question of
how the people act. The democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, as Sheldon Wolin writes, created a new “idea of collective
action thereby contesting the monopoly on action previously enjoyed by
kings, military leaders, aristocrats and prelates.”17 Heroism was a collec-
tive as well as an individual preoccupation of nineteenth-​century political
theory. As John Stuart Mill would write, if previous radical changes in gov-
ernment “had been made always by and commonly for, a few; the French
Revolution was emphatically the work of the people. Commenced by the
people, carried on by the people, defended by the people with a heroism and
self-​devotion unexampled in any other period of modern history.”18 In visual
culture, as I will explore in Chapters 3 and 5, the “emergence of multitudes
as the protagonists of public life” transformed passive spectators into a new
visual language of “group organization, coordination, and mobilization; of
strikes, rallies, assemblies, campaigns, and marches; of acts of symbolic or
real aggression and self-​defense.”19
As the personal and external rule of the king was replaced by the im-
personal and immanent self-​rule of the people, representational dilemmas
emerged that impacted questions not only of institutionalization and law, in
other words, but also of visualization, composition, and form. Unlike the sov-
ereign acts of kings and queens, the self of collective self-​government could
not be assumed or made directly available to sensory experience. Because the
people has no clear form, it could assume multiple and competing forms—​
not merely an electorate, but also leaders, public opinion, demonstrations,
declarations of principle. “A theory of democracy,” Pierre Rosanvallon has
 Introduction 5

argued, “must consist in the first place in constructing a typology of these fig-
ures of the people, or their modalities of appearance and expression, as well
as the ways in which they become institutionalized.”20
This dynamic of figurative peopling is, thus, a key component of our
“modern social imaginaries,” the ways “people ‘imagine’ their social exist-
ence . . . [and] their social surroundings” so as to make “possible common
practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”21 Imaginary investments
of peoplehood mediate the people’s relationship to their own political
empowerment—​how they understand themselves to be a part of and act as
a people. In this book, I will explore the distinct aesthetic-​political problem
of how to envision the people as a collective actor, a question that haunts
the history and theory of modern democracy even though it has been in-
sufficiently recognized by democratic theory’s usual preoccupation with
the principles, norms, and procedures for legitimizing democratic rule. Far
from being a barren site of disenchantment and demystification, democracy
engenders new fantasies of collective belonging and transformative agency.
Democratic citizenship is inseparable from this unending elicitation of the
popular imagination, and in democratic contexts fantasies of peopling inevi-
tably become extraordinary sites of political contestation.

II.

Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, the so-​called dreamer of modern democracy, was

acutely aware of the imaginary investments required as popular sovereignty’s
condition of possibility, even as he also marshaled the full force of his phil-
osophical and literary talents to prevent popular sovereignty’s fantasy space
from becoming a site of political conflict.22 We must “scrutinize the act by
which people become a people,” he wrote in The Social Contract, “for that
act, being necessarily antecedent to [any] other, is the real foundation of so-
ciety.”23 Rousseau recognized that popular sovereignty would require new
imperatives of peopling—​the rituals of collectivity that he described in
Geneva, for example, and that he envisioned in his constitutional proposals
for Corsica and Poland—​but, as I will explore in Chapter 2, he also recognized
that placing the people as the sovereign foundation of political authority
would engender demands beyond these imaginary investments: demands
not only for the people’s existence as an “imagined community,” but for their
collective, assembled presence.
6 Introduction

Rousseau has often been wrongly described as a proponent of direct de-

mocracy, but he did insist on the direct and unmediated presence of the
people in the sovereign assembly. For Rousseau, the people’s sovereign
empowerment—​ their inalienable, indivisible, and indestructible will—​
engenders an unceasing demand that the people be both imagined and
occasionally made physically manifest. Rousseau understood that along-
side democracy’s imaginary investments, there would emerge pressures
of physical materialization that would pose a series of dilemmas for po-
litical theorists and political actors in the coming era of democratic revo-
lution. If the people is at once an effect of democratic representation and
its very authorizing ground—​as contemporary theorists of the paradox of
peoplehood have demonstrated with Rousseau as their central canonical
figure—​the question arises of how to politically navigate the forms of polit-
ical contestation and competing claims of peoplehood that emerge within
that aporetic space.24 The unrepresentable sovereign assembly that sits at the
heart of Rousseau’s theory of legitimacy is his attempt to fill the troubling gap
of democratic representation with the people’s authoritative collective pres-
ence. “When the people are assembled,” Rousseau writes, “the jurisdiction of
the government ceases . . . [because] in the presence of the represented there
is no longer any representation.”25
Rousseau’s affirmation of the people’s collective presence in the sovereign
assembly has often been denounced as a dangerous perversion of democ-
racy and even the source of “democratic totalitarianism” by theorists who
have focused attention on the distinctive dilemmas that democracy poses to
questions of political representation. Rousseau is often read as the emblem-
atic figure of collective self-​immanence and democratic auto-​poesis.26 A tra-
dition of theoretical reflection on democracy indebted to Claude Lefort’s
conceptualization of democracy’s “empty space” of power—​traversing the
ideological spectrum from François Furet and Marcel Gauchet on the Right,
to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe on the Left—​has been profoundly
attuned to democracy’s imaginary investments and symbolic forms while
also being skeptical of what it construes as dangerous Rousseauian myths of
collective embodiment and immediacy, which are usually conceptualized in
the political theological language of incarnation. The attempt to redirect the
political-​aesthetic problem of what I call the people as popular manifestation
into the political theological problem of incarnation is the focus of Chapter 1.
Contemporary theorists of democratic symbolism insist in various ways
on the importance of affirming the “gap” of democratic representation and
 Introduction 7

rejecting democratic “illusions of pure self-​immanence.”27 Rosanvallon, who

is the most prominent contemporary exemplar of this tradition, writes that
in a democracy, the people “loses all bodily density and becomes, positively,
a number, that is, a force composed of equals, of individuals who are purely
equivalent only under the reign of law.”28 All claims of democratic embodi-
ment or materialization are conceived by this tradition of theoretical reflec-
tion as dangerous disfigurations, infantile longings, or totalitarian impulses
generated from within the symbolism of democracy itself. Democracy, in
contrast, must be understood as strictly identical to the “disincorporation of
power.”29
We need not embrace Rousseau’s particular vision of the people’s collec-
tive presence in democratic politics in order to think more carefully about
the demand for collective embodiment beyond democracy’s imaginary
investments that his work makes legible. Rousseau’s theory of popular sov-
ereignty offers an anticipatory diagnostic of the central dilemmas of peo-
pling that would emerge in the era of democratic revolution. Rousseau’s
systemic theoretical reflections on these issues allow us to see more clearly
how and why emergent democracy would come to generate not only imag-
inary investments but, beyond them, demands for the people’s direct public
appearance and manifestation. Making the people not only imaginable but
also tangible to the senses was a recurrent dilemma of the late eighteenth-​
and nineteenth-​century age of democratic revolutions. Democracy does not
conceal sovereign power or shroud it in a mystical sanctum, but renders it
publicly manifest, stages its actions, presents its own scaffolding.30 Collective
staging and popular aestheticization are essential parts of a democratic polit-
ical culture, and the politics of popular assembly was and remains one of the
principle, most dynamic, and most historically persistent sites of this form of
political enactment.31

III.

If democratic theorists, following Jürgen Habermas’s lead, have focused a

great deal of attention on how a ratio-​critical public emerged out of growing
networks of print capitalism, coffee houses, reading publics, and so on, they
have focused less attention on how the proliferation of popular assemblies—​
crowds, demonstrations, gatherings of the “people out of doors”—​mediated
and gave tangibility to the people manifesting itself as a collective actor
8 Introduction

capable of enacting dramatic political reforms and change.32 “In political

contexts animated by the emerging principle of popular sovereignty,” as
Colin Lucas writes, “the physical display of the people as an embodiment of
popular voice took on powerful new meaning.”33 It is this “new” meaning
and the “power” it obtains in emerging democratic contexts that should be
more carefully examined. When the radical John Thelwall urged the people
in 1796 to “lift up your voices . . . [and] let not only the nocturnal phantom,
but the living body of your complaints appear before your oppressors,” he
signaled the power the people’s physical manifestation in revolt would come
to play against opposing claims that this power was merely a phantom, a chi-
mera, a ghost.34
The scholarship on the politics of crowds is obviously extensive, but it
has mostly focused on questions still dictated by the reactionary and anti-​
democratic “crowd theory” and “crowd psychology” of the nineteenth and
early twentieth century—​in the work of such figures as Hippolyte Taine,
Gustave Le Bon, and Scipio Sighele.35 It has done so even when responding
critically to that literature. Studies of the “moral economy” of the crowd, for
example—​E. P. Thompson, George Rudé, and many others—​remain largely
focused on the motivations of crowds, the normative and even rational basis
of their collective acts.36 Studies of the changing historical repertoires of
crowd politics undertaken by such scholars of social movements as Charles
Tilly and Sidney Tarrow have illuminated the shifting patterns and dissemi-
nation of distinctive forms of contentious politics, but have rarely examined
the underlying potency of popular assembly itself as a distinctive—​and dis-
tinctively powerful—​form of political representation.37
In her recent book on assembly, Judith Butler has raised some of the central
questions surrounding the political power of popular assembly. For Butler,
the unauthorized physical gathering and circulation of bodies in public
space materializes the reality of an emergent political collectivity against
the incessant individualizing interpellations of neoliberalism. If power al-
ways sustains itself in part through the regulation of the proper modes of
appearance—​or what Jacques Rancière has theorized as the distribution of
the sensible, the reigning order “of perceptions and practices that shape and
sustain a common world and our orientation to it”38—​Butler’s theory of as-
sembly severs the “theater of legitimacy” from its “self-​evident correspond-
ence with public space.”39
“When bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of
public space,” Butler writes, “they are exercising a plural performative right
 Introduction 9

to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political
field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily
demand for a more livable set of economic, social, and political conditions
no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity.”40 Butler’s key theoretical
contributions here are twofold. On the one hand, she insightfully insists on
the performative speech act of assembly itself, “that by coming together [the
popular assembly] is already an enactment of popular will. . . . The ‘we’ voiced
in language is already enacted by the gathering of bodies, their gesture and
movements, their vocalizations, and their ways of acting in concert.”41 Butler
offers important insights concerning how the assembly is already “speaking”
as a political form beyond the particular claims or explicit demands made by
the people gathered in Gezi, Puerta del Sol, Zucotti, and Taksim.
However, rather than dwelling on the distinctive form of political repre-
sentation enacted by the popular assembly, Butler redirects this question
of the prediscursive dimensions of the assemblies’ collective speech act to
the ethical question of shared bodily vulnerability and the experience of
precarity. This is her second key theoretical contribution to the theory of
popular assembly. For Butler, what the assembly speaks in its very form of
enactment are “the material urgencies of the body.”42 Popular assemblies
express a shared embodied condition of exposure and physical vulnera-
bility, such that their implied claim in gathering—​indeed, their “ontological
ground”—​becomes a new ground of commonality that remains open to the
deep pluralism of the movements she most admires: the common bond of
shared mortality, physical vulnerability, and fragile interdependent embod-
iment. Butler’s theory of assembly thus becomes part of what Bonnie Honig
has called her larger theory of “mortalist humanism.”43
The approach I take in this book resonates with Butler’s first contribution,
albeit in a more historically situated mode, while departing from the second.
I pursue the enigmatic power of popular assembly as a distinctive form of
democratic representation. The resonant claim—​ sometimes implicit, at
other times explicit—​made by popular assemblies across a multitudinous
history of democratic enactments, from the storming of the Bastille to the
leaderless insurgency coursing through the streets of Hong Kong, is: “you
do not represent us!” Popular assemblies take shape in the aporetic space
of democratic representation—​the space that figures the people as both the
authorizing source and the effect of representation. As they do so, they set
into motion the condition for the emergence of new collectivities and po-
litical subjects. “The survival and flourishing of democracy,” as Wolin once
10 Introduction

wrote, “in the first instance depends upon the people’s changing themselves,
sloughing off their political passivity and acquiring the lost characteristics
of the demos. . . . To become democratic . . . is to change one’s self, to learn
how to act collectively as a demos.”44 Far from being reduced to mere force,
violence, or what Habermas described as the “pressure of the street,” many
commentators within and on the “Age of the Democratic Revolution” saw
revolutionary crowds and popular assemblies as signs of a formerly passive
people emerging and taking form as a collective actor, a political collec-
tivity giving tangible evidence of the people’s existence and political capacity.
“The most magnificent of all spectacles is that of a great people assembled,”
Robespierre once proclaimed.45 They must see themselves assembled in
order to feel their power.
The most reactionary critics of emergent democracy were often the most
lucid observers of this dynamic. Writing at the end of a decade of popular
mobilization against the colonial authorities in North America, for example,
Gouverneur Morris, eventual delegate to the Continental Congress and au-
thor of the preamble to the US Constitution, decried the political mobiliza-
tion of the popular classes over these years and their collective appearance in
public life through the assembly politics of the people out of doors. “Behold a
great metamorphosis,” Morris wrote in 1774. “These reptiles, simple as they
are, cannot be gulled as heretofore . . . there is no ruling them . . . the mobility
grow dangerous to the gentry, and how to keep them down is now the ques-
tion. While they correspond with other colonies, call and dismiss popular
assemblies, make resolves to bind the consciences of the rest of mankind,
bully poor printers, and exert with full force all their other tribunitial powers,
it is impossible to curb them. . . . The mob begin to think and reason. Poor
reptiles. It is with them a vernal morning, they are struggling to cast off their
winter’s slough, they bask in the sunshine, and ere noon they will bite.”46
Popular assemblies are privileged sites of democratic representation be-
cause they at once claim to represent the people while also signaling the ma-
terial plenitude beyond any representational claim. The distinctive power
of popular assemblies as a form of democratic representation is engendered
in part from their internal reference to the materialization of that vital sur-
plus which lies beyond it. Assemblies make manifest that which escapes rep-
resentational capture; they rend a tear in the established representational
space of appearance and draw their power from tarrying with the ineffability
and resistant materiality of the popular will. Democratic representation
enlists both an abstraction—​the people—​and an insistence on particularity
 Introduction 11

and collective concreteness beyond the existing representational regime.

This double demand generates a dynamic tension and lends popular as-
sembly its distinctiveness and power in the complex ecology of democratic
representation.
Democracy has often been associated by contemporary democratic
theorists with the representation of the unrepresentable, but too often this
has been taken to merely signify the impossibility of any final and author-
itative representation of the popular will: a way of keeping the “gap” of de-
mocracy “open.” The association of democracy with what Lefort calls the
disincorporation of power does not in itself offer the theoretical resources for
thinking through the particularity of popular assembly as a form of demo-
cratic representation. It too quickly reduces it to dangerous tendencies to re-
incorporate the space of political power through sovereign incarnation. The
problem of popular assembly as I approach it here is an aesthetic rather than
a juridical problem. Political aesthetics provides us with a productive frame-
work for thinking about popular assembly as a distinctive and distinctively
powerful mode of democratic representation. Aesthetic peoplehood is the
emergent or incipient domain of the people before they are given form as an
identity, organized into institutions, or articulated as a coherent voice. It is
a matter of political appearance rather than political visibility. Political aes-
thetics is the terrain that mediates this popular emergence and that orients us
to the revolutionary idea of the democratic sublime.

IV.

The invocation of the sublime was pervasive in the political discourses of the
French Revolution. It was invoked to describe the Revolution’s drama, the
patriotism and the virtue it required of its citizens, the popular enthusiasm
that inspired their heroic acts of sacrifice, but, above all, it was invoked to de-
scribe the people themselves. The Revolution revealed the sovereign people
to be the sublime actor of their own collective history. Marie-​Hélène Huet
has explored “the extraordinary appeal of the sublime for revolutionary
thought,” and that appeal was extended and amplified across the revolu-
tionary era inaugurated in 1789.47 Indeed, the sublime ultimately came to
be associated with revolutionary experience itself—​with its “instance of dis-
continuity in experience, the moment of loss and disfigurement.”48 Some,
and most notably Immanuel Kant, ascribed that judgment primarily to the
12 Introduction

disinterested spectators of the revolutionary drama rather than to the actors

themselves. “It is the mode of thinking of the spectators (die Denkungsart
der Zuschauer),” Kant wrote, “which reveals itself publicly in this game of
great revolutions, and manifests such a universal yet disinterested sympathy
for the players on one side against those on the other.”49 The power and dis-
tinctiveness of the sublime in revolutionary political contexts indexes certain
anxieties, dilemmas, and paradoxes around the triumph of the people as the
legitimate source of political authority, and particularly around the appro-
priate modes of their representation.
To describe the people as sublime is to claim something more concep-
tually specific than simply noting their greatness, eminence, or majesty. By
the time Louis de Jaucourt published his 1765 entry on the sublime for the
Encyclopédie—​defining it as “everything that elevates us above what we were,
and simultaneously makes us aware of that elevation”—​the concept had be-
come ubiquitous in discussions of art and aesthetics across Europe.50 While
the concept goes back to the ancient world, it was revived in the late sev-
enteenth century with Nicolas Boileau’s influential 1674 translation of Peri
Hupsous, which at the time was thought to be authored by the third-​century
Greek rhetorician Longinus. Boileau published the work as Du Sublime,
which established an influential framework through which increasingly
philosophical—​and political—​debates about the nature of aesthetic experi-
ence developed across the following century.
Du Sublime was focused on the power of poetic language not only to rhe-
torically persuade or rationally convince, but to overwhelm, convert, and
transport (ekstasis) the reader or listener to another more elevated state.
Sublime writing “does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself. The
startling and amazing is more powerful than the charming or persuasive, if
it is indeed true that to be convinced is usually within our control whereas
amazement is the result of an irresistible force beyond the control of any
audience.”51 Longinus influentially associated the sublime with the tran-
scendence of established rules and conventions. The valorization of the sub-
lime following his work challenged the reigning Neoclassical emphasis on
the aesthetic preeminence of order, rationality, harmony, symmetry, regu-
larity, composition, and form, and instead investigated the contours of aes-
thetic experiences which pointed beyond the limits of those categories and
conventions and questioned their sufficiency. Sublime experience was asso-
ciated with battles and violent heroism, transcendence and divine judgment,
untamed nature and the vast wilderness. In his classic study of the aesthetic
 Introduction 13

of the sublime, Samuel Holt Monk described it as an increasingly philosoph-

ical critique of the epistemic pretentions of the Enlightenment that devel-
oped from within Enlightenment discourse itself, and thereby set the stage
for the Romantic critique at century’s end.52
By the middle of the eighteenth century, the aesthetic of the sublime had
moved beyond rhetoric and poetry to encompass the full range of the arts—​
painting and performance, music and architecture. It had also been devel-
oped and conceptually contrasted with a separate aesthetic of beauty. Burke’s
1757 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful, which I explore at length in Chapter 4, was the most important text
for initially drawing out the philosophical and political dimensions of this
distinction. The sublime is obscure, dark, vast, infinite, absolute, formless,
and terrible; the beautiful is clear, light, delicate, domesticated, useful, and
charming. At its heart, the experience of the sublime, which Burke described
with technical specificity as a feeling of “delightful horror,” was a confronta-
tion with mortality, limitation, ruin, and heteronomy, but with the distance
required of an aesthetic experience. The sublime delineated a “limit experi-
ence” that decentered the subject through an encounter with vast powers that
transcend human reason, utility, representation, and imagination, but rather
than diminishing the self through this encounter with power, the sublime
elevated the subject beyond itself, enabling a transcendence of its personal,
individual, self-​interested ego.
The precise nature of that “elevation” became an important point of philo-
sophical and political contention, with some following Burke in recognizing
in the sublime the dignifying subordination of human beings to higher
authorities (first of divinity, and then of tradition), and others following Kant
in associating sublime experience with the ultimate recuperation of the ca-
pacious powers of human reason itself against the determinations of nature.
For Burke, the sublime was a sign of the “proud submission” of the human
will to powers beyond its sovereign control. For Kant, all aesthetic pleasure
was distinctively disinterested as we become aware of our capacity for judg-
ment itself, and if the Geistesgefühl of the sublime is initially experienced as
limitation and insufficiency, it terminates in the affirmation of the power of
transcendental subjectivity to rise above mere sensuality and intuit the tri-
umph of the moral freedom of the will.53
Underwriting these very different interpretations of the philosophical
and political significance of the sublime, however, was a remarkably con-
sistent account of the contours of sublime experience. In his Critique of the
14 Introduction

Power of Judgment, Kant wrote that “perhaps there has never been a more
sublime utterance, nor a thought more sublimely expressed than the well-​
known inscription upon the Temple of Isis (Mother Nature): ‘I am all that
is, and that was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil from
before my face.’ ”54 For both Burke and Kant, the sublime involved an en-
counter with the ineffable and posed the central question of how that which
is beyond our sensory grasp—​the face behind the veil, the people beyond
its physical manifestation—​can nonetheless be presented through sensory
and aesthetic experience (even if only in what Kant called a “merely negative
presentation”).55 The sublime posed fundamental questions about the expe-
rience of the limits of experience, in other words, the representation of the
unrepresentable, or, as Jean-​François Lyotard came to formalize it: the “pre-
sentation of the nonpresentable.”56 It is this paradigmatic dimension of sub-
lime experience that resonates so intensely within the discourses of popular
sovereignty at the time of the people’s revolutionary triumph.
The idea of the democratic sublime condenses a dynamic conceptual ten-
sion between its two operative terms. On the one hand, democracy conceived
as the kratos/​power of the demos/​people is associated with the collective as-
sertion of human autonomy. Cornelius Castoriadis examined this defining
trait of democracy with great depth in terms of the “self-​institution of so-
ciety.”57 On the other hand, the sublime is associated with the experience of
the limitation of human knowledge, instrumentality, and representation. As
Thomas Weiskel put the point in his study of the romantic sublime, “without
some notion of the beyond, some credible discourse of the superhuman, the
sublime founders; or it becomes a ‘problem.” “A humanistic sublime is an ox-
ymoron.”58 The aesthetic of the sublime draws its power from the experience
of human limitations transgressed, from that which escapes our power to
know, utilize, or represent: the limits of the autonomy democracy affirms.
Rather than asserting a simple contradiction between its central terms, the
democratic sublime is better understood as a dynamic synthesis of antago-
nistic concepts, a dynamic synthesis that names a resonant theoretical and
political dilemma of the age of democratic revolutions: how can the newly
empowered people at once manifest its collective power while also and at the
same time remaining ineffable and forever transcending any given form or
assembled manifestation? In the democratic sublime the immanence of the
people’s collective power becomes a source of sublime awe. The inexhausti-
bility of the people’s collective capacities to make the world anew, the miracle
of democratic initiation and self-​institution, is the locus and source of the
 Introduction 15

democratic sublime. In the discourse of the democratic sublime—​distinct

as it is from the “rhetorical,” “natural,” or “religious” sublime—​the people
becomes the name for that initiatory plenitude that remains inexhaustible
and forever beyond itself.

V.

The book’s six chapters alternate between those that zoom out to provide a
wider theoretical and historical overview of how the aesthetics of popular
assembly emerged as a problem of popular sovereignty during the age of
democratic revolution, and those that zoom in to explore in more detail how
these issues were engaged in the work of a single political theorist. While
the chapter organization is broadly chronological, the book does not tell a
developmental story. The alternating chapters are meant to vivify how the
aesthetic issues of popular manifestation resonate across a wide range of po-
litical and theoretical sites during the period, and how they continue to pose
dilemmas to democratic theory and democratic politics today. The history
this book explores does not unfold “the sequence of events like the beads of a
rosary,” as Walter Benjamin once wrote, but instead traces “the constellation
which our own era has formed with a definite earlier one.”59
Chapter 1 outlines the book’s central aesthetic-​political question. While
contemporary democratic theory has explored the paradoxes of peoplehood
and the dilemmas of authorization and legality that follow from them, this
chapter focuses on a related but conceptually distinct problem: the ques-
tion of how popular sovereignty’s authorizing entity, the people, publicly
appears, how it makes itself tangible to the senses. How can the people take
shape as a collective actor when no formal rules and procedures for identi-
fying popular will exist, or when these rules and procedures are so deeply
contested as to be effectively deauthorized? Chapter 1 examines how this
question emerges in the work of two seminal theorists of modern democracy
who have written extensively on the French Revolution—​Carl Schmitt and
Claude Lefort—​only to be redirected from the aesthetic-​political problem
of manifestation to the political theological problem of incarnation. There
is a more complex and compelling theoretical relationship ­between demo-
cratic authority and popular assembly than most contemporary democratic
theorists have recognized, and this relationship may help explain both the
persistent role of popular public assembly within democratic politics up to
16 Introduction

the present day, as well as its distinctive power as a particular form of demo-
cratic representation.
While contemporary democratic theorists have rarely engaged this ques-
tion in any detail, it was a central preoccupation of the preeminent modern
theorist of popular sovereignty: Jean-​Jacques Rousseau. Chapter 2 examines
the centrality of popular assemblies to Rousseau’s theory of popular sover-
eignty by taking seriously the role they play in “maintaining sovereign au-
thority,” which can only be done by sustaining or reenacting the source of
that authority: the living body of the people themselves. Rousseau’s sover-
eign assemblies are often taken to be the clearest expression of his invest-
ment in what Jacques Derrida called a “metaphysics of presence.” Even as
Rousseau’s sovereign assemblies provide the foundation of collective self-​
rule, however, the occasion through which the people’s will is expressed as
law, understanding their relationship to Rousseau’s aesthetics also reveals an
underappreciated ritual function, giving reenacted form and continuity to
the very people whose will is expressed through them. The assembly form is
the necessary—​and necessarily hidden—​supplement from which the people’s
seemingly unmediated will is derived. The sovereign assembly is, therefore,
at once the source of the people’s collective autonomy, and a heteronomic
support which provides its ongoing condition of possibility. The spectacle
of the sovereign people viewing themselves purportedly without mediation,
without representation, is a powerful part of the resonant radical myth of the
following century, the sublime myth of revolutionary democracy.
The transition from royal to popular sovereignty formalized in Rousseau’s
political theory entailed not only the reorganization of institutions of gov-
ernance and theories of political legitimacy, but also a dramatic and less-​
examined transformation in the iconography of political power and rule.
Chapter 3 examines the pressures of popular visualization that accompanied
the victorious appearance of popular sovereignty at key moments of its emer-
gence, and how competing strategies of imaging popular will were implicated
in different conceptions of popular agency and power. Chapter 3 is focused
on the emergence of “the living image of the people,” the idea that collective
assemblies, crowds, and mass protests were no longer understood as mere
factious riots or seditious rebellions, but instead as living manifestations of
the people’s authority, sublime expressions of the vitality and significance of
popular will.
Burke remains one of the great theorists of the aesthetic dimensions of
political life, and Chapter 4 focuses on his account of the sublime production
 Introduction 17

of political authority. Burke’s theory of the sublime identifies an instinctive

“delight” that human beings take in their own subordination: it is an affec-
tive device for naturalizing order and rank in human society and the psy-
chological foundation of such distinctive Burkean formulations as “proud
submission,” “dignified obedience,” and “ennobled freedom.” However, the
French Revolution, and its enthusiastic reception by British radicals during
the 1790s, occasioned a revision of Burke’s political aesthetics, whereby the
sublime was no longer associated with astonishment, novelty, and ennobling
disorientation, but with the gravity of an historical inheritance transmitted
across time by the Ancient Constitution. Burke’s antirevolutionary writings
mark a transition in his thinking from a political aesthetics of sublime tran-
scendence to one of historical immanence. The revolution controversy of
the 1790s, which disputed fundamental questions of political legitimacy
and the ends of government, was also concerned with the fate of political
aesthetics in modern democratic politics. Burke’s critical account of the aes-
thetics of democratic revolution provides useful orientation for contempo-
rary theorists engaging the aesthetic dimensions of democratic authority.
Chapter 5 turns to a central symbol of the popular will during the age of
democratic revolution: the insurgent barricade. While the insurgent bar-
ricade dates back to the sixteenth century as a defensive tactic against the
forces of state repression, it was only during the long nineteenth century
that it acquired its distinctly modern and positive association with popular
constituent power. After the July Revolution of 1830, the barricade spread
rapidly throughout Europe as the vital symbol and material instance of rev-
olutionary upheaval; it became an essential component of what Charles Tilly
describes as the revolutionary repertoire of popular contention. Chapter 5
examines the insurgent barricade as a space that enabled a distinctive form
of political subjectivization, one that not only materialized the boundary of
the political—​the defining opposition between the people and the state—​
but simultaneously enacted a self-​organizing manifestation of popular will.
Chapter 5 shows how the insurgent barricade became the site of a tangible
formation of a collective intention.
The book’s final chapter examines how the political aesthetics of collec-
tive assembly was engaged by the nineteenth century’s preeminent theorist
of democracy: Alexis de Tocqueville. François Furet argued that a central as-
pect of Tocqueville’s history of the French Revolution in The Old Regime was
that he denied the revolutionaries the validity of their most cherished self-​
understanding: the faith in their own Promethean and collective capacity to
18 Introduction

make the world anew. Alongside Tocqueville’s rejection of the world-​making

capabilities of the popular will, however, was his pronounced concern with
the disappearance of meaningful human agency in the democratic age. One
of the structuring ironies of Tocqueville’s political thought was that the very
democratic and revolutionary era that promised to bring human agency to
an equal mankind, freeing human beings from their bondage to tradition
and their submission to the sacred, actually threatened individuals with the
eradication of agency and unprecedented forms of domination. Tocqueville’s
pervasive sense of “religious terror” (terreur religieuse) is engendered from
this historical spectacle of evacuated agency, the spectacle of everyone, in
his words, being “driven willy-​nilly along the same road,” and having “joined
the common cause, some despite themselves, others unwittingly, like blind
instruments in the hands of God.”60 Tocqueville’s religious terror is both a
symptom and a diagnosis of his concern with the deflated status of the in-
dividual actor in democratic contexts, and his interest to deny such agency
to any collective actor, to deny heroism, and its associated grandeur, to the
popular will.
The Afterword examines how the central questions taken up in this book
regarding the political aesthetics of collective assembly have been engaged by
the most influential contemporary theorist of the relationship between aes-
thetics and politics, Jacques Rancière. Rancière’s democratic theory affirms
not only an an-​archic antifoundationalism, but also an everyday theory of
political subjectivization and democratic appearance, through which “the
power of the people” is “re-​enacted ceaselessly by political subjects that chal-
lenge the police distribution of parts, places, or competences, and that re-​
stage the anarchic foundations of the political.”61 The Afterword focuses on
Rancière’s conceptualization of the relationship between democracy as a pol-
itics without arche, and the singular acts of political subjectivizatioon and
democratic appearance that bring this contingency to light and enact it on
the public stage. I turn first to Rancière’s work and then to a series of images
created by the contemporary artist Glenn Ligon. Ligon’s work provides an
occasion for thinking in more historically and aesthetically detailed ways
about the forms of everyday speech and action conceptually illuminated
by Rancière’s distinctive theory of democratic appearance as opposed to
democratic visibility.
 1
Popular Manifestation

Popular constituent power, once a concept closely associated with radical

critiques of liberal constitutionalism on the Left and the Right, and with the
investigations of such “Continental” topics as political theology, insurgent
partisanship, and the sovereign state of exception, has recently become a key
concern of Anglo-​American democratic and constitutional theorists. As the
concept has moved to the center of scholarly debates, it has also become more
respectable, the subject of increasingly elaborate attempts to bring it within
the fold of liberal constitutionalism itself: popular constituent power has be-
come an important test of liberal constitutionalism’s democratic capacious-
ness.1 This has had significant consequences for how its central concept—​the
constituent people—​has been theorized. “As an actor,” Andrew Arato writes,
“the people are fictional unless they are redefined in legal terms as the collec-
tivity of citizens or the electorate in which case they become an entity pro-
duced by law, rather than the ultimate source of law.”2 Viewing the people
first and foremost as a legal entity rather than exploring their “fictional”
status as “an actor” has been a hallmark of much of the recent scholarship on
the popular constituent power.
Lost in these efforts to convert the people into an abstract legiti-
mating norm and to ensure their enclosure within constitutional courts,
conventions, and parliamentary proceedings is any sustained attention to
what Joel Colón-​Ríos has called the “informal practices” of the constituent
people’s “initiating powers”: acts of civil disobedience, street assemblies,
mass protests, insurgencies, and revolutionary upheaval.3 Popular constit-
uent power should bring these forms of extraparliamentary and insurgent
politics into view because the people it envisions is irreducible to a legally au-
thorized or institutionally articulated collective. The people of popular con-
stituent power is always, at least in part, “the people out of doors.” As such,
the people of popular constituent power is poorly understood if it is reduced
to the executive status of a constitutional author—​“We the People”—​and ne-
glected as a dynamic, internally contested, and always provisional initiator

The Democratic Sublime. Jason Frank, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190658151.003.0002
20 The Democratic Sublime

of radical constitutional change. To dispel the “fiction” or the “myth” of the

people as a collective actor is to neglect the dynamic generativity and con-
crete political productivity of these myths in contexts of radical democratic
emergence and change. In this opening chapter, I will attempt to bring some
of these neglected dimensions more clearly into view by outlining a concep-
tion of the people as a problem of popular manifestation.

I.

In a famous letter sent to James Madison in September 1789, written from

Paris in the midst of that summer’s revolutionary upheaval, Thomas Jefferson
elaborated on the principles of an inalienable and living popular sovereignty,
wherein “the dead have no rights” and “no society” can legitimately “make a
perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law.”4 “The earth belongs always
to the living generation,” Jefferson proclaimed there, turning to the actuarial
language of “generations” rather than “the people” to emphasize that the
principles he invoked were not abstract principles of legitimation, so much
as catalysts to the active and ongoing renewal of popular constituent power.5
Every nineteen years, Jefferson reasoned, the constitutional authority of the
living generation “naturally expires” and must return to the reflection and
choice of the people themselves. The recurrence to popular authorization
could not be left up to initiatives of reform movements of popular repeal,
because “the people cannot assemble themselves . . . their representation is
unequal and vicious.”6
Jefferson’s letter has been endlessly cited, parsed, and criticized by dem-
ocratic and constitutional theorists interested in the political and legal
dilemmas surrounding the concept of popular constituent power.7 Alongside
his equally famous comments on the value of insurrection—​“a little rebellion
now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms
in the physical”—​and even popular violence—​“The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”—​the 1789
letter to Madison is often cited as an example of Jefferson’s dangerous polit-
ical naïveté, impracticality, and democratic romanticism.8 Madison himself
seems to have seen it in just this way, when, echoing arguments he had previ-
ously made in Federalist No. 49, he responded to Jefferson’s letter with a set of
“very powerful objections” to Jefferson’s theoretical reasoning, most notably
that Jefferson’s schema would establish a government “too mutable to retain
 Popular Manifestation 21

those prejudices in its favor which antiquity inspires” and which are “salutary
to the most rational government in the most enlightened age.”9
I open with Jefferson’s letter not to rehash familiar theoretical debates
around the democratic legitimacy and practical viability of constituent
power, constitutional precommitment, or popular constitutionalism. I am
interested in the letter for what it more quietly suggests about Jefferson’s
understanding of the role of informal popular assemblies—​crowds, mobs,
gatherings of “the people out of doors”—​in periods of revolutionary tran-
sition when constitutional authority does not “naturally expire” and where
“unequal and vicious” representation has to be actively combatted and over-
come by people who must precisely “assemble themselves” without relying
on established legal authority or the authorized procedures of political will
formation. Jefferson’s famous letter, so thoroughly examined by contempo-
rary democratic theorists interested in the problem of popular constituent
power, indirectly points to another set of theoretical issues and problems that
democratic theorists have generally neglected and that I am going to bring
into focus through what I will call the problem of popular manifestation.
Jefferson’s letters written from France during this period often returned
to reflect on the mobs and crowds that propelled the Revolution forward,
just as they had in the North American colonies a generation earlier. Already
in 1774, Jefferson could write in his Summary View of the Rights of British
America that “there are extraordinary situations which require extraordinary
interposition. An exasperated people, who feel that they possess power, are
not easily restrained within limits strictly regular.”10 Jefferson offered a con-
ceptual contrast between “mobs” and “riots” that “seem to have no end in
view but mischief and plunder,” and those popular uprisings that intimate
the very forms of popular democratic legitimacy described in his famous
letter to Madison.11 Jefferson distinguished, for example, between “mobs
occasioned by want of bread in different parts of the kingdom,” and those
which have “connections generally with the constitutional revolution” un-
derway.12 Writing in the month after the fall of the Bastille, Jefferson con-
cluded that “having observed the mobs with my own eyes in order to be
satisfied of their objects, I saw so plainly the legitimacy of them.”13
In many of his letters written from revolutionary France, Jefferson tacks
back and forth between what historians of contentious politics describe as
“direct-​action crowds” with immediate aims such as seizing grain supplies or
publicly humiliating a deviant or criminal, and “symbolic crowds” invested
with normative or legal authorization. During the late eighteenth century,
22 The Democratic Sublime

the crowd went from being a localized collective seeking immediate redress
of grievances—​the direct action crowd acting only on the authority of those
gathered and seeking redress from those immediately present—​to a rep-
resentative or symbolic crowd often seeking indirect redress of grievances
and proclaiming to act on behalf of a larger symbolic entity: the people.14
In Jefferson’s view, the popular assemblies of Paris were an essential part of
the project of total constitutional revision. “So strongly fortified was the des-
potism of this government by long possession, by the respect and fears of the
people . . . the national assembly with all their good sense, could without mobs
probably have only obtained a considerable improvement, not a total revi-
sion of it.”15 Far from being reduced to mere force, violence, or what Jürgen
Habermas describes as the “pressure of the street,” Jefferson approached “the
ocular evidence” of revolutionary crowds and popular assemblies as signs of
a formerly passive people emerging and taking form as a collective actor, a
political collectivity giving tangible evidence of the people’s existence and
political capacity.16
Without offering a fully articulate theory of emergent popular assem-
blies, Jefferson’s letters illuminate the revolutionary problem of popular
manifestation, but he was hardly alone among prominent observers of the
Revolution in identifying the formative role played by gatherings of the
people out of doors—​that is, the great journées, the popular insurrections
and demonstrations, which broke out intermittently between 1789 and 1795
(one historian has counted 251 of them in Paris alone during these years)—​
in productively mediating the emergence of the people as a collective actor
on the stage of history.17 If democratic theorists, following Habermas’s lead,
have focused a great deal of attention on how a ratio-​critical public emerged
out of growing networks of print capitalism, coffee houses, reading publics,
and so on, they have focused much less attention on how the proliferation of
political crowds facilitated and gave tangibility to the people manifesting it-
self as a collective actor capable of facilitating dramatic political reforms and
change. A century before Gustave Le Bon declared an “Age of Crowds” in
1895, there had been sustained attention paid to the significant role that in-
formal popular assemblies played in mediating the transition from royal to
popular sovereignty, and especially during the great democratic revolutions
in America and France. “In political contexts animated by the emerging
principle of popular sovereignty,” Colin Lucas writes, “the physical display
of the people as an embodiment of popular voice took on powerful new
meaning.”18
 Popular Manifestation 23

Revolutionary crowds like those that charged the Bastille intermingled

with the emerging radical democratic idea—​François Furet called it the
“revolutionary catechism”—​that collectives could act deliberately, indeed,
heroically in taking their own political destiny into their hands.19 This for-
mative role of new collectivities was noted by some of the most influential
and articulate observers of the Revolution, whether they were its passionate
advocates or eloquent defenders of the ancien régime. Consider a familiar ex-
ample. On October 5, 1789, a riot broke out in a central marketplace of Paris
over the high price and the scarcity of bread. The riot was largely made up
of women in the marketplace but it was soon joined by thousands of others
who redirected the crowd’s complaints beyond the price of bread to the
larger political reforms being demanded by the National Assembly and the
king’s failure to respond effectively to the demands that had been mounting
since earlier that summer. Over the course of the day, the market women
and their allies swelled into a crowd of thousands in front of the Hotel de
Ville. Encouraged by revolutionary agitators, they ransacked the city armory
for weapons and then marched the twelve or so miles to the royal palace at
Versailles. Once there, the crowd besieged the palace, sent a delegation to
meet the king, and finally the following morning broke into the palace it-
self, killed a few royal guards, and, in a dramatic confrontation that became
the focus of many subsequent reports, compelled the king, the queen, their
family, and members of Assembly to return with them to Paris.
This event was almost immediately mythologized as the Women’s March
on Versailles, and historians still debate the contours of what actually
occurred. Along with the Reveillon Riots and the Bastille insurrection, it
comprised one of the three great journées of 1789. According to George Rudé,
the women’s march “completed the Paris revolution of July, because so long as
the King and Court remained at Versailles, power still remained divided be-
tween revolutionary citizens and the adherents of the ancien régime.”20 As the
king and queen were compelled by the crowd to return to Paris against their
will, many commentators identified a dramatic staging of the practical and
symbolic transference of power from the crown to the people, here taking
the form, in the words of Edmund Burke, of “the furies of hell in the abused
shape of the vilest of women.”21
As I will elaborate on in Chapter 4, Burke made this episode the center-
piece of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, the prism through which
the revolutionary spectacle revealed its innermost essence as a brutal disen-
chantment of authority. It was a politics stripped of adornment and reduced
24 The Democratic Sublime

to cold utility, where laws are to be supported only by their own terrors,” and
where “at the end of every vista we see nothing but the gallows.”22 Burke’s
elaborate reflections on the world historical consequences of a crowd-​ruined
court and a violated queen had been provoked by a single line in Richard
Price’s political sermon “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” which
Price had delivered to London’s Revolution Society in November 1789 and
then published in pamphlet form. For Price, the collective action of the
October Days was nothing short of a sublime spectacle that condensed the
broader revolutionary aspirations “of thirty millions of people, indignant
and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an irresist-
ible voice, their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering
himself to his subjects.”23 Love it or loathe it, Burke and Price agreed that the
crowd played an essential role in the dynamic process of popular democrati-
zation that each identified with the unfolding Revolution itself.
For all of the attention contemporary observers and later historians placed
on the emerging role of crowds and collectives in the dramatic events of the
age, it is surprising they have received so little attention from democratic
theorists, even those who have become centrally preoccupied with the poli-
tics of peoplehood and dilemmas associated with popular constituent power.
Recent theoretical investigations into the politics of popular assembly—​such
as Judith Butler’s performative theory of collective assembly discussed in the
Introduction or Jodi Dean’s contrasting study of the disorganized desire of
the crowd and the articulatory power of the vanguard party—​are also largely
disconnected from the history of these collective repertoires and their com-
plicated entanglement with the history of popular sovereignty itself.24
The problem of popular manifestation emerges from precisely this entan-
glement. It is related to, but conceptually distinct from, democratic theory’s
explorations of “the boundary problem” and the paradoxes of popular self-​
authorization, that is, the political and theoretical dilemmas that emerge
from the fact that determining the identity of the sovereign people is an un-
avoidable democratic problem that is, nonetheless, not something that the
people can themselves democratically decide: the very question subverts the
premises of its resolution. In contrast to the dilemmas of legality, legitimacy,
and authority posed by this “paradox of politics,” the problem of popular
manifestation might be more accurately described as an aesthetic problem.25
It focuses instead on how this authorizing entity, the people, publicly appears,
how it makes itself visible and tangible, how the people takes shape as a col-
lective actor when no formal rules and procedures for identifying popular
 Popular Manifestation 25

will exist, or when these rules and procedures are so deeply contested as to be
effectively deauthorized.
The central question of popular manifestation is not primarily who the
people are, in other words, but the related question of how the people ap-
pear and how they act. The problem of popular manifestation is not focused
on the familiar question of the people as the legitimating source of public
authority, but on the people as a collective actor pursuing a common set
of goals. How to image and envision the people as a collective actor is an
aesthetic-​political problem that haunts modern democratic theory even
though it is usually overshadowed by democratic theory’s preoccupation
with the principles, norms, and procedures legitimizing democratic rule. It
is this aesthetic-​political dimension of emergent popular sovereignty that the
problem of popular manifestation helps bring into focus.
In his influential history of the emergence of popular sovereignty in
Anglophone political discourses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Edmund Morgan offers a helpful indication of how the problem of popular
manifestation appeared in the period of transition from royal to popular sov-
ereignty. Morgan suggests that the replacement of the personal and external
rule of the king with the impersonal and immanent self-​rule of the people
posed representational difficulties not only of institutionalization and law,
but also of visualization and form. “The sovereignty of the people,” Morgan
writes, “is a much more complicated, one might say more fictional fiction
than the divine right of kings. A king, however dubious his divinity might
seem, did not have to be imagined. He was a visible presence, wearing his
crown and carrying his scepter. The people, on the other hand, are never vis-
ible as such. Before we ascribe sovereignty to the people we have to imagine
that there is such a thing, something we personify as though it were a single
body, capable of thinking, of acting, of making decisions and carrying them
out.”26
Morgan’s emphasis on the democratic imperatives of popular image and
imagination is illuminating, although it is not a problem that he himself
explores at any length. His point clearly resonates with Benedict Anderson’s
study of the discursive construction of “imagined communities,” or Kevin
Olson’s more recent investigation of “imagined sovereignties.”27 However,
this emphasis on imagination alone does not adequately engage how com-
peting strategies of envisioning popular will were implicated in different
conceptions of popular agency and power. Images of peoplehood mediate
the people’s relationship to their own political empowerment—​how they
26 The Democratic Sublime

understand themselves to be a part of and act as a people.28 Making the

people not only imaginable but also tangible to the senses was a recurrent di-
lemma of the late eighteenth-​century age of democratic revolutions.
These imperatives of collective tangibility and visualization were nav-
igated in different ways and assumed different historical forms beyond
crowds and popular assemblies. Miguel Abensour, for example, has exam-
ined how the transition from “the revolution of restoration to the revolu-
tion of the abyss” was mediated by the embodiment of the revolutionary
hero—​a Marat, a Robespierre, a Saint Just—​who could “act without rules,
without procedures or norms through a purely performative action.”29 In
her classic study of the revolutionary culture of festival, Mona Ozouf has
examined how the orchestrated popular festivals of the revolution sought
to give expression to the sacred sublimity of the nation without artifice, how
they sought to establish a “theatrical non-​theatricality” to make the invisible
constitution of the people present to themselves.30 And many prominent
historians, including Maurice Agulhon, Lynn Hunt, and Joan Landes, have
examined the complex entanglement of political and aesthetic arguments
surrounding the artistic depiction of the sovereign nation, from David’s
radical democratic proposals for a Hercules wielding his club to the allegor-
ical depictions of Marianne.31
Crowds and informal assemblies, then, are only one constellation of
practices for thinking about the problem of popular manifestation during
periods of revolutionary transition, but they are a particularly important one
for democratic theorists interested in the historical emergence of popular
sovereignty and popular constituent power and the dilemmas it posed—​and
continues to pose—​for our understanding of radical democratic politics. The
idea that popular assemblies and crowds were manifestations of the popular
will assumes a distinctly modern democratic form in this period.32 William
Sewell, for example, has argued that the French Revolution’s “act of epoch-​
making cultural creativity occurred in a moment of ecstatic discovery: the
taking of the Bastille, which had begun as an act of defense against the king’s
aggression, revealed itself in the days that followed as a concrete, unme-
diated, and sublime instance of the people expressing its sovereign will.”33
Popular constituent power should be approached as a complex and dynamic
political process, mobilized and enacted across multiple dimensions of po-
litical life, rather than viewed narrowly as a problem of juridical principles
or constitutional norms. It is also an aesthetic question insofar as crowds,
which, as Joy Connolly writes, give democratic “political communities their
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
under her magic spell, as easily Queen of Venice as Venice was
Queen of the Sea. How at thirty, then in the full radiance of her
beauty, beloved and besought by every hand that could touch her
own, painters vied with each other in matching the tints of her
marvelous skin; sculptors begged for models of her feet to grace
their masterpieces; poets sang her praises, and the first musicians of
Italy wrote the songs that her lovers poured out beneath her
windows. How there had come a night when suddenly the whole
course of her life was changed,—the night of a great ball given at
one of the old palaces on the Grand Canal, the festivities ending with
a pageant that revived the sumptuous days of the Republic, in which
the Contessa herself was to take part.
When the long-expected hour arrived, she was seen to step into her
gondola, attired in a dress of the period, a marvel of velvet and cloth
of gold. Then she disappeared as completely from human sight as if
the waters of the canal had closed over her forever.
For days all investigation proved fruitless. The only definite clue
came from her gondolier, who said that soon after the gondola had
left the steps of her palace, the Contessa ordered him to return
home at once; that on reaching the landing she covered her face
with her veil and reëntered the palace. Later it was whispered that
for many weeks she had not left her apartments. Then she sent for
her father confessor, and at a secret interview announced her
decision never again to appear to the world.
At this point of the story the Professor had risen from his seat and
poured half the flagon in his glass. He was evidently as much
absorbed in the recital as if it had all happened yesterday. I could
see, too, that it appealed to those quaint, romantic views of life
which, for all their absurdities, endeared the old fellow to every one
who knew him.
“For a year,” he continued, “this seclusion was maintained; no one
saw the Contessa, not even her own servants. Her meals were
served behind a screen. Of course, all Venice was agog. Every
possible solution of so strange and unexpected a seclusion was
suggested and discussed.
“In the beginning of the following winter vague rumors reached the
good father’s ears. One morning he left his devotions, and,
waylaying her duenna outside the palace garden, pressed his rosary
into her hands and said: ‘Take this to the Contessa.’” Here the
Professor became very dramatic, holding out his hand with a quick
gesture, as if it clasped the rosary. “‘Tell her that to-night, when San
Giorgio strikes twelve, I shall be at the outer gate of the palace and
must be admitted.’”
Then, pacing up and down the narrow arbor, his face flushed, his
eyes glistening, the old fellow told the rest of the story. “When,” said
he, “the hour arrived, the heavy grated door, the same through which
you can now see the wine casks, was cautiously opened. A moment
later the priest was ushered into a dimly lighted room, luxuriously
furnished, and screened at one end by a silken curtain, behind which
sat the Contessa. She listened while he told her how all Venice was
outraged at her conduct, many hearts being grieved and many
tongues dropping foul slander. He remonstrated with her about the
life she was leading, condemning its selfishness and threatening the
severest discipline. But neither threats nor the voice of slander
intimidated the Contessa. She steadfastly avowed that her life had
been blameless, and despite the earnest appeals of the priest
persisted in the determination to live the rest of her days in quiet and
seclusion. The most he was able to effect was a promise that within
a month she would open the doors of her palace for one more great
ball. Her friends would then be reassured and her enemies silenced.
“The records show that no such festival had been seen in Venice for
many years. The palace was a blaze of light. So great was the crush
of gondolas bringing their beauteous freight of richly dressed
Venetians, that the traffic of the canal was obstructed for hours. Ten
o’clock came, eleven, and still there was no Contessa to welcome
her guests. Strange stories were set afloat. It was whispered that a
sudden illness had overtaken her. Then, as the hours wore on, the
terrible rumor gained credence, that she had been murdered by her
servants, and that the report of her illness was only a cloak to
conceal their crime.
“While the excitement was at its height, a man, in the costume of a
herald, appeared in the great salon and announced the arrival of the
hostess. As the hour struck twelve a curtain was drawn at the farther
end of the room, revealing the Contessa seated upon a dais,
superbly attired in velvet and lace, and brilliant with jewels. When the
hum and wonder of the surprise had ceased, she arose, stood like a
queen receiving the homage of her subjects, and, welcoming her
guests to her palace, bade them dance on until the sun rose over the
Lido. Then the curtains were drawn, and so ended the last sight of
the Contessa in Venice. Her palace was never opened again. Later
she disappeared completely, and the spiders spun their webs across
the threshold.
“Years afterward, a man repairing a high chimney on a roof
overlooking this very garden—the chimney can still be seen from the
far corner below the landing—saw entering the arbor a noble lady,
leaning upon the arm of a distinguished looking man of about her
own age. In the lady he recognized the Contessa.
“Little by little, the story came out. It appeared that immediately after
the ball she had moved to this château, a part of her own estates,
which had been quietly fitted up and restored. It was then
remembered that soon after the château had been finished, a certain
Marquis, well known in France, who had adored the Contessa for
years, and was really the only man she ever loved, had disappeared
from Paris. He was traced at the time to Milan and Genoa, and finally
to Venice. There all trace of him was lost. Such disappearances
were not uncommon in those days, and it was often safer even for
one’s relatives to shrug their shoulders and pass on. Further
confirmation came from the gondolier, who had landed him the night
of his arrival at the water-gate of this garden,—just where we landed
an hour ago,—and who, on hearing of his supposed murder, had
kept silent upon his share in the suspected crime. Inquiries
conducted by the State corroborated these facts.
“Look around you, mon ami,” exclaimed the Professor suddenly.
“Underneath this very arbor have they sat for hours, and in the
window of that crumbling balcony have they listened to the low
sound of each other’s voice in the still twilight, the world shut out, the
vine-covered wall their only horizon. Here, as the years passed
unheeded, they dreamed their lives away. L’amour, l’amour, vous
êtes tout puissant!”
The Professor stopped, turned as if in pain, and rested his head on
his arm. For some moments neither of us spoke. Was the romance
to which I had listened only the romance of the Contessa, or had he
unconsciously woven into its meshes some of the silken threads of
his own past? When he raised his head I said: “But, Professor, you
have not told me the secret she kept from the priest. Why did she
shut herself up? What was it that altered the whole course of her
life?”
“Did I not tell you? Then listen. She had overheard her gondolier say,
as she stepped into her gondola on the fatal night of the great fête at
the Foscari, ‘The Contessa is growing old; she is no longer as
beautiful as she was.’”
I looked at the old fellow to see if he were really in earnest, and,
throwing back my head, laughed heartily. For the first time in all my
intercourse with him I saw the angry color mount to his cheeks.
He turned quickly, looked at me in astonishment, as if unable to
believe his ears, and said sharply, knitting his brows, “Why do you
laugh?”
“It seems so absurd,” I replied. “What did she expect; to be always a
goddess?”
“Ah, there you go!” he burst out again, with flashing eyes. “That is
just like a cold-blooded materialist. I hate your modern Shylock, who
can see a pound of flesh cut from a human heart with no care for the
hot blood that follows. Have you no sympathy deep down in your
soul for a woman when she realizes for the first time that her hold on
the world is slipping? Can you not understand the agony of the
awakening from a long dream of security and supremacy, when she
finds that others are taking her place? The daily watching for the loss
of color, the fullness of the waist, the penciling of care-lines about the
eyes? We men have bodily force and mental vigor, and sometimes
lifelong integrity, to commend us, and as we grow older and the first
two fail, the last serves us best of all; but what has a woman like the
Contessa left? I am not talking of an ordinary woman, nor of all the
good daughters, good wives, and good mothers in the world. You
expect in such women the graces of virtue, duty, and resignation. I
am talking of a superb creature whom the good God created just to
show the world what the angels looked like. I insist that before you
laugh you must put yourself in the place of this noble Contessa
whom all Venice adored, whose reign for fifteen years had been
supreme, whose beauty was to her something tangible, a weapon, a
force, an atmosphere. She had all the other charms that adorned the
women of her day, good-humor, a rich mind, charity, and wit, but so
had a hundred other Venetians of her class. I insist that before
censuring her, you enter the salon and watch with her the faces of
her guests, noting her eagerness to detect the first glance of delight
or disappointment, and her joy or chagrin as she reads the verdict in
their eyes. Can you not realize that in a beauty such as hers there is
an essence, a spirit, a something divine and ethereal? A something
like the bloom on these grapes, adding the exquisite to their
lusciousness; like the pure color of the diamond, intensifying its
flash? A something that, in addition to all her other qualities, makes a
woman transcendent and should make her immortal? We men long
for this divine quality, adore it, go mad over it; and yet when it has
faded, with an inconstancy and neglect which to me is one of the
enigmas of human nature, we shrug our shoulders, laugh, and pass
on. Believe me, mon ami, when that gondolier confirmed the looking-
glass of the Contessa, his words fell upon her ears like earth upon
her coffin.”
If the Professor’s emotion at the close of the story was a surprise to
me, this frenzied outburst, illogical and quixotic as it seemed, was
equally unexpected. I could hardly realize that this torrent of fiery
passion and pent-up energy had burst from the frail, plain little body
before me. Again and again, as I looked at him, the thought ran
through my mind, Whom had he loved like that? What had come
between himself and his own Contessa? Why was this man an exile
—this cheery, precise, ever courteous dignified old thoroughbred,
with his dry, crackling exterior, and his volcano of a heart beneath?
Or was it Venice, with her wealth of traditions,—traditions he had
made his own,—that had turned his head?
Long after the Professor left the garden, I sat looking about me,
noting the broken walls overhung with matted vines, and the little
lizards darting in and out. Then I strolled on and entered the doorway
of the old château, and looked long and steadily at the ruined
balcony, half buried in a tangle of roses, the shadows of their waving
blossoms splashing the weather-stained marble; and thence to the
apartment above, where these same blossoms thrust themselves far
into its gloom, as if they too would search for the vision of loveliness
that had vanished. Then I wandered into an alcove sheltering the
remains of an altar and font—the very chapel, no doubt, where the
good priest had married her; on through the unkept walks bordered
on each side by rows of ancient box, with here and there a gap
where the sharp tooth of some winter more cruel than the rest had
bitten deep, and so out again into the open garden, where I sat down
under a great tree that sheltered the head of a Madonna built into the
wall—the work of Canova, the Professor had told me.
Despite my own convictions, I seem to feel the presence of these
spirits of the past that the Professor, in his simple, earnest way, had
conjured up before me, and to see on every hand evidences of their
long life of happiness. The ruined balcony, with its matted rose vines,
had now a deeper meaning. How often had the beautiful Venetian
leaned over this same iron grating and watched her lover in the
garden below! On how many nights, made glorious by the radiance
of an Italian moon, had they listened to the soft music of passing
gondolas beyond the garden walls?
The whole romance, in spite of its improbability and my thoughtless
laughter, had affected me deeply. Why, I could not tell. Perhaps it
was the Professor’s enthusiasm; perhaps his reverence for the
beauty of woman, as well as for the Contessa herself. Perhaps he
had really been recalling a chapter out of his own past, before exile
and poverty had made him a wanderer and a dreamer. Perhaps!—
Yes, perhaps it was the thought of the long, quiet life of the Contessa
with her lover in this garden.
AMONG THE FISHERMEN
KNOW best the fishing quarter of Ponte Lungo and the
district near by, from the wooden bridge to the lagoon, with
the side canal running along the Fondamenta della
Pallada. This to me is not only the most picturesque
quarter of Venice, but quite the most picturesque spot I know in
Europe, except, perhaps, Scutari on the Golden Horn.
This quality of the picturesque saturates Venice. You find it in her
stately structures; in her spacious Piazza, with its noble Campanile,
clock tower, and façade of San Marco; in her tapering towers, deep-
wrought bronze, and creamy marble; in her cluster of butterfly sails
on far-off, wide horizons; in her opalescent dawns, flaming sunsets,
and star-lit summer nights. You find it in the gatherings about her
countless bridges spanning dark water-ways; in the ever-changing
color of crowded markets; in lazy gardens lolling over broken walls;
in twisted canals, quaint doorways, and soggy, ooze-covered
landing-steps. You find it, too, in many a dingy palace—many a lop-
sided old palace—with door-jambs and windows askew, with lintels
craning their heads over the edge, ready to plunge headlong into the
canal below.
The little devils of rot and decay, deep down in the water, are at the
bottom of all this settling and toppling of jamb and lintel. They are
really the guardians of the picturesque.
Search any façade in Venice, from flowline to cornice, and you
cannot find two lines plumb or parallel. This is because these imps of
destruction have helped the teredo to munch and gnaw and bore,
undermining foundation pile, grillage, and bed-stone. If you listen
some day over the side of your gondola, you will hear one of these
old piles creak and groan as he sags and settles, and then up comes
a bubble, as if all the fiends below had broken into a laugh at their
triumph.
This change goes on everywhere. No sooner does some inhabitant
of the earth build a monstrosity of right-angle triangles, than the little
imps set to work. They know that Mother Nature detests a straight
line, and so they summon all the fairy forces of sun, wind, and frost,
to break and bend and twist, while they scuttle and bore and dig,
until some fine morning after a siege of many years, you stumble
upon their victim. The doge who built it would shake his head in
despair, but you forgive the tireless little devils—they have made it
so delightfully picturesque.
To be exact, there are really fewer straight lines in Venice than in any
place in Europe. This is because all the islands are spiked full of
rotting piles, holding up every structure within their limits. The
constant settling of these wooden supports has dropped the
Campanile nearly a foot out of plumb on the eastern façade,
threatened the destruction of the southwest corner of the Doges’
Palace, rolled the exquisite mosaic pavement of San Marco into
waves of stone, and almost toppled into the canal many a church
tower and garden wall.
Then again there are localities about Venice where it seems that
every other quality except that of the picturesque has long since
been annihilated. You feel it especially in the narrow side canal of
the Public Garden, in the region back of the Rialto, through the Fruit
Market, and in the narrow streets beyond—so narrow that you can
touch both sides in passing, the very houses leaning over like
gossiping old crones, their foreheads almost touching. You feel it too
in the gardens along the Giudecca, with their long arbors and
tangled masses of climbing roses; in the interiors of many courtyards
along the Grand Canal, with pozzo and surrounding pillars
supporting the rooms above; in the ship and gondola repair-yards of
the lagoons and San Trovaso, and more than all in the fishing
quarters, the one beyond Ponte Lungo and those near the Arsenal,
out towards San Pietro di Castello.
This district of Ponte Lungo—the one I love most—lies across the
Giudecca, on the “Island of the Giudecca,” as it is called, and is
really an outskirt, or rather a suburb of the Great City. There are no
grand palaces here. Sometimes, tucked away in a garden, you will
find an old château, such as the Contessa occupied, and between
the bridge and the fondamenta there is a row of great buildings,
bristling with giant chimneys, that might once have been warehouses
loaded with the wealth of the East, but which are now stuffed full of
old sails, snarled seines, great fish-baskets, oars, fishermen, fisher-
wives, fisher-children, rags, old clothes, bits of carpet, and gay,
blossoming plants in nondescript pots. I may be wrong about these
old houses being stuffed full of these several different kinds of
material, from their damp basement floors to the fourth story garrets
under baking red tiles; but they certainly look so, for all these things,
including the fisher-folk themselves, are either hanging out or thrust
out of window, balcony, or doorway, thus proving conclusively the
absurdity of there being even standing room inside.
Fronting the doors of these buildings are little rickety platforms of
soggy planks, and running out from them foot-walks of a single
board, propped up out of the wet on poles, leading to fishing-smacks
with sails of orange and red, the decks lumbered with a
miscellaneous lot of fishing-gear and unassorted sea-truck—
buckets, seines, booms, dip-nets, and the like.
Aboard these boats the fishermen are busily engaged in scrubbing
the sides and rails, and emptying the catch of the morning into their
great wicker baskets, which either float in the water or are held up on
poles by long strings of stout twine.
All about are more boats, big and little; row-boats; storage-boats
piled high with empty crab baskets, or surrounded with a circle of
other baskets moored to cords and supported by a frame of hop-
poles, filled with fish or crabs; barcos from across the lagoon, laden
with green melons; or lighters on their way to the Dogana from the
steamers anchored behind the Giudecca.
Beyond and under the little bridge that leads up the Pallada, the
houses are smaller and only flank one side of the narrow canal. On
the other side, once an old garden, there is now a long, rambling
wall, with here and there an opening through which, to your surprise,
you catch the drooping figure of a poor, forlorn mule, condemned for
some crime of his ancestors to go round and round in a treadmill,
grinding refuse brick. Along the quay or fondamenta of this narrow
canal, always shady after ten o’clock, lie sprawled the younger
members of these tenements—the children, bareheaded,
barefooted, and most of them barebacked; while their mothers and
sisters choke up the doorways, stringing beads, making lace, sitting
in bunches listening to a story by some old crone, or breaking out
into song, the whole neighborhood joining in the chorus.

THE CATCH OF THE MORNING

Up at the farther end of the Pallada and under another wooden
bridge, where two slips of canals meet, there is a corner that has
added more sketches to my portfolio than any single spot in Venice.
An old fisherman lives here, perhaps a dozen old fishermen; they
come and go all the time. There is a gate with a broken door, and a
neglected garden trampled down by many feet, a half-ruined wall
with fig-trees and oleanders peeping over from the garden next door,
a row of ragged, straggling trees lining the water’s edge, and more
big fish and crab baskets scattered all about,—baskets big as
feather-beds,—and festoons of nets hung to the branches of the
trees or thrown over the patched-up fences,—every conceivable and
inconceivable kind of fishing plunder that could litter up the premises
of a pescatore of the lagoon. In and out of all this débris swarm the
children, playing baby-house in the big baskets, asleep under the
overturned boat with the new patch on her bottom, or leaning over
the wall catching little crabs that go nibbling along a few inches
below the water-line.
In this picturesque spot, within biscuit-throw of this very corner, I
have some very intimate and charming friends—little Amelia, the
child model, and young Antonio, who is determined to be a gondolier
when he grows up, and who, perhaps, could earn a better living by
posing for some sculptor as a Greek god. Then, too, there is his
mother, the Signora Marcelli, who sometimes reminds me of my
other old friend, the “Grand Duchess of the Riva,” who keeps the
caffè near the Ponte Veneta Marina.
The Signora Marcelli, however, lacks most of the endearing qualities
of the Duchess; one in particular—a soft, musical voice. If the
Signora is in temporary want of the services of one of her brood of
children, it never occurs to her, no matter where she may be, to send
another member of the household in search of the missing child; she
simply throws back her head, fills her lungs, and begins a crescendo
which terminates in a fortissimo, so shrill and far-reaching that it
could call her offspring back from the dead. Should her husband, the
Signor Marcelli, come in some wet morning late from the lagoon,—
say at nine o’clock, instead of an hour after daylight,—the Signora
begins on her crescendo when she first catches sight of his boat
slowly poled along the canal. Thereupon the Signora fills the
surrounding air with certain details of her family life, including her
present attitude of mind toward the Signore, and with such volume
and vim that you think she fully intends breaking every bone under
his tarpaulins when he lands,—and she is quite able physically to do
it,—until you further notice that it makes about as much impression
upon the Signore as the rain upon his oilskins. It makes still less on
his neighbors, who have listened to similar outbursts for years, and
have come to regard them quite as they would the announcement by
one of the Signora’s hens that she had just laid an egg—an event of
too much importance to be passed over in silence.
When the Signor Marcelli arrives off the little wooden landing-ladder
facing his house, and, putting things shipshape about the boat,
enters his doorway, thrashing the water from his tarpaulin hat as he
walks, the Signora, from sheer loss of breath, subsides long enough
to overhaul a unique collection of dry clothing hanging to the rafters,
from which she selects a coat patched like Joseph’s of old, with
trousers to match. These she carries to the Signore, who puts them
on in dead silence, reappearing in a few moments barefooted but
dry, a red worsted cap on his head, and a short pipe in his mouth.
Then he drags up a chair, and, still silent as a graven image,—he
has not yet spoken a word,—continues smoking, looking furtively up
at the sky, or leaning over listlessly and watching the chickens that
gather about his feet. Now and again he picks up a rooster or
strokes a hen as he would a kitten. Nothing more.
Only then does the Signora subside, bringing out a fragment of
polenta and a pot of coffee, which the fisherman divides with his
chickens, the greedy ones jumping on his knees. I feel assured that
it is neither discretion nor domestic tact, nor even uncommon sense,
that forbids a word of protest to drop from the Signore’s lips. It is
rather a certain philosophy, born of many dull days spent on the
lagoon, and many lively hours passed with the Signora Marcelli,
resulting in some such apothegm as, “Gulls scream and women
scold, but fishing and life go on just the same.”
There is, too, the other old fisherman, whose name I forget, who
lives in the little shed of a house next to the long wall, and who is
forever scrubbing his crab baskets, or lifting them up and down, and
otherwise disporting himself in an idiotic and most aggravating way.
He happens to own an old water-logged boat that has the most
delicious assortment of barnacles and seaweed clinging to its sides.
It is generally piled high with great baskets, patched and mended,
with red splotches all over them, and bits of broken string dangling to
their sides or banging from their open throats. There are also a lot of
rheumatic, palsied old poles that reach over this ruin of a craft, to
which are tied still more baskets of still more delicious qualities of
burnt umber and Hooker’s-green moss. Behind this boat is a sun-
scorched wall of broken brick, caressed all day by a tender old
mother of a vine, who winds her arms about it and splashes its hot
cheeks with sprays of cool shadows.
When, some years ago, I discovered this combination of boat,
basket, and shadow-flecked wall, and in an unguarded moment
begged the fisherman to cease work for the morning at my expense,
and smoke a pipe of peace in his doorway, until I could transfer its
harmonies to my canvas, I spoke hurriedly and without due
consideration; for since that time, whenever this contemporary of the
original Bucentoro gets into one of my compositions,—these old fish-
boats last forever and are too picturesque for even the little devils to
worry over,—this same fisherman immediately dries his sponge,
secures his baskets, and goes ashore, and as regularly demands
backsheesh of soldi and fine-cut. Next summer I shall buy the boat
and hire him to watch; it will be much cheaper.
Then there are the two girls who live with their grandmother, in one
end of an old tumble-down, next to the little wooden bridge that the
boats lie under. She keeps a small cook-shop, where she boils and
then toasts, in thin strips, slices of green-skinned pumpkin, which the
girls sell to the fishermen on the boats, or hawk about the
fondamenta. As the whole pumpkin can be bought for a lira, you can
imagine what a wee bit of a copper coin it must be that pays for a
fragment of its golden interior, even when the skilled labor of the old
woman is added to the cost of the raw material.
Last of all are the boys; of no particular size, age, nationality, or
condition,—just boys; little rascally, hatless, shoeless, shirtless,
trouser—everything-less, except noise and activity. They yell like
Comanches; they crawl between the legs of your easel and look up
between your knees into your face; they steal your brushes and
paints; they cry “Soldi, soldi, Signore,” until life becomes a burden;
they spend their days in one prolonged whoop of hilarity, their nights
in concocting fresh deviltry, which they put into practice the moment
you appear in the morning. When you throw one of them into the
canal, in the vain hope that his head will stick in the mud and so he
be drowned dead, half a dozen jump in after him in a delirium of
enjoyment. When you turn one upside down and shake your own
color-tubes out of his rags, he calls upon all the saints to witness that
the other fellow, the boy Beppo or Carlo, or some other “o” or “i,” put
them there, and that up to this very moment he was unconscious of
their existence; when you belabor the largest portion of his surface
with your folding stool or T-square, he is either in a state of collapse
from excessive laughter or screaming with assumed agony, which
lasts until he squirms himself into freedom; then he goes wild,
turning hand-springs and describing no end of geometrical figures in
the air, using his stubby little nose for a centre and his grimy thumbs
and outspread fingers for compasses.
All these side scenes, however, constitute only part of the family life
of the Venetian fishermen. If you are up early in the morning you will
see their boats moving through the narrow canals to the fish market
on the Grand Canal above the Rialto, loaded to the water’s edge
with hundreds of bushels of crawling green crabs stowed away in the
great baskets; or piles of opalescent fish heaped upon the deck,
covered with bits of sailcloth, or glistening in the morning sun.
Earlier, out on the lagoon, in the gray dawn, you will see clusters of
boats with the seines widespread, the smaller dories scattered here
and there, hauling or lowering the spider-skein nets.
But there is still another and a larger fishing trade, a trade not exactly
Venetian, although Venice is its best market. To this belong the
fishermen of Chioggia and the islands farther down the coast. These
men own and man the heavier seagoing craft with the red and
orange sails that make the water life of Venice unique.
Every Saturday a flock of these boats will light off the wall of the
Public Garden, their beaks touching the marble rail. These are
Ziem’s boats—his for half a century; nobody has painted them in the
afternoon light so charmingly or so truthfully. Sunday morning, after
mass, they are off again, spreading their gay wings toward Chioggia.
On other days one or two of these gay-plumed birds will hook a line
over the cluster of spiles near the wall of the Riva, below the arsenal
bridge, their sails swaying in the soft air, while their captains are
buying supplies to take to the fleet twenty miles or more out at sea.
Again, sometimes in the early dawn or in the late twilight, you will
see, away out in still another fishing quarter, a single figure walking
slowly in the water, one arm towing his boat, the other carrying a
bag. Every now and then the figure bends over, feels about with his
toes, and then drops something into the bag. This is the mussel-
gatherer of the lagoon. In the hot summer nights these humble
toilers of the sea, with only straw mats for covering, often sleep in
their boats, tethered to poles driven into the yielding mud. They can
wade waist-deep over many square miles of water-space about
Venice, although to one in a gondola, skimming over the same
glassy surfaces, there seems water enough to float a ship.
These several grades of fishermen have changed but little, either in
habits, costume, or the handling of their craft, since the early days of
the republic. The boats, too, are almost the same in construction and
equipment, as can be seen in any of the pictures of Canaletto and
the painters of his time. The bows of the larger sea-craft are still
broad and heavily built, the rudders big and cumbersome, with the
long sweep reaching over the after-deck; the sails are loosely hung
with easily adjusted booms, to make room for the great seines which
are swung to the cross-trees of the foremast. The only boat of really
modern design, and this is rarely used as a fishing-boat, is the
sandolo, a shallow skiff drawing but a few inches of water, and with
both bow and stern sharp and very low, modeled originally for
greater speed in racing.
Whatever changes have taken place in the political and social
economy of Venice, they have affected but little these lovers of the
lagoons. What mattered it to whom they paid taxes,—whether to
doge, Corsican, Austrian, or king,—there were as good fish in the
sea as had ever been caught, and as long as their religion lasted, so
long would people eat fish and Friday come round every week in the
year.
A GONDOLA RACE
O-DAY I am interested in watching a gondolier make his
toilet in a gondola lying at my feet, for the little table holding
my coffee stands on a half-round balcony that juts quite
over the water-wall, almost touching the white tenda of the
boat. From this point of vantage I look down upon his craft, tethered
to a huge spile bearing the crown and monogram of the owner of the
hotel. One is nobody if not noble, in Venice.
The gondolier does not see me. If he did it would not disturb him; his
boat is his home through these soft summer days and nights, and
the overhanging sky gives privacy enough. A slender, graceful
Venetian girl, her hair parted on one side, a shawl about her
shoulders, has just brought him a bundle containing a change of
clothing. She sits beside him as he dresses, and I move my chair so
that I can catch the expressions of pride and delight that flit across
her face while she watches the handsome, broadly-built young
fellow. As he stands erect in the gondola, the sunlight flashing from
his wet arms, I note the fine lines of his chest, the bronzed neck and
throat, and the knotted muscles along the wrist and forearm. When
the white shirt with broad yellow collar and sash are adjusted and the
toilet is complete, even to the straw hat worn rakishly over one ear,
the girl gathers up the discarded suit, glances furtively at me, slips
her hand into his for a moment, and then springs ashore, waving her
handkerchief as he swings out past the Dogana, the yellow ribbons
of his hat flying in the wind.
Joseph, prince among porters, catches my eye and smiles
meaningly. Later, when he brings my mail, he explains that the pretty
Venetian, Teresa, is the sweetheart of Pietro the yellow-and-white
gondolier who serves the English lady at the Palazzo da Mula.
Pietro, he tells me, rows in the regatta to-day, and these
preparations are in honor of that most important event. He assures
me that it will be quite the most interesting of all the regattas of the
year, and that I must go early and secure a place near the stake-boat
if I want to see anything of the finish. It is part of Joseph’s duty and
pleasure to keep you posted on everything that happens in Venice. It
would distress him greatly if he thought you could obtain this
information from any other source.
While we talk the Professor enters the garden from the side door of
the corridor, and takes the vacant seat beside me. He, too, has come
to tell me of the regatta. He is bubbling over with excitement, and
insists that I shall meet him at the water-steps of the little Piazzetta
near the Caffè Veneta Marina, at three o’clock, not a moment later.
To-day, he says, I shall see, not the annual regatta,—that great
spectacle with the Grand Canal crowded with tourists and sight-
seers solidly banked from the water’s edge to the very balconies,—
but an old-time contest between the two factions of the gondoliers,
the Nicoletti and Castellani; a contest really of and for the Venetians
themselves.
The course is to begin at the Lido, running thence to the great flour-
mill up the Giudecca, and down again to the stake-boat off the Public
Garden. Giuseppe is to row, and Pasquale, both famous oarsmen,
and Carlo, the brother of Gaspari, who won the great regatta; better
than all, young Pietro, of the Traghetto of Santa Salute.
“Not Pietro of this traghetto, right here below us?” I asked.
“Yes; he rows with his brother Marco. Look out for him when he
comes swinging down the canal. If you have any money to wager,
put it on him. Gustavo, my waiter at Florian’s, says he is bound to
win. His colors are yellow and white.”
This last one I knew, for had he not made his toilet, half an hour
before, within sight of my table? No wonder Teresa looked proud and
happy!
While the Professor is bowing himself backward out of the garden,
hat in hand, his white hair and curled mustache glistening in the sun,
an oleander blossom in his button-hole, Espero enters, also
bareheaded, and begs that the Signore will use Giorgio’s gondola
until he can have his own boat, now at the repair-yard next to San
Trovaso, scraped and pitched; the grass on her bottom was the
width of his hand. By one o’clock she would be launched again. San
Trovaso, as the Signore knew, was quite near the Caffè Calcina;
would he be permitted to call for him at the caffè after luncheon? As
the regatta began at three o’clock there would not be time to return
again to the Signore’s lodging and still secure a good place at the
stake-boat off the Garden.
No; the illustrious Signore would do nothing of the kind. He would
take Giorgio and his gondola for the morning, and then, when the
boat was finished, Espero could pick up the Professor at the Caffè
Veneta Marina in the afternoon and bring him aboard Giorgio’s boat
on his way down the canal.
Giorgio is my stand-by when Espero is away. I often send him to my
friends, those whom I love, that they may enjoy the luxury of
spending a day with a man who has a score and more of sunshiny
summers packed away in his heart, and not a cloud in any one of
them. Tagliapietra Giorgio, of the Traghetto of Santa Salute, is his full
name and address. Have Joseph call him for you some day, and
your Venice will be all the more delightful because of his buoyant
strength, his cheeriness, and his courtesy.
So Giorgio and I idle about the lagoon and the Giudecca, watching
the flags being hoisted, the big barcos being laden, and various
other preparations for the great event of the afternoon.
After luncheon Giorgio stops at his house to change his tenda for the
new one with the blue lining, and slips into the white suit just
laundered for him. He lives a few canals away from the Calcina, with
his mother, his widowed sister and her children, in a small house
with a garden all figs and oleanders. His bedroom is next to his
mother’s, on the second floor, overlooking the blossoms. There is a
shrine above the bureau, decorated with paper flowers, and on the
walls a scattering of photographs of brother gondoliers, and some
trophies of oars and flags. Hanging behind the door are his oilskins
for wet weather, and the Tam O’Shanter cap that some former
padrone has left him, as a souvenir of the good times they once had
together, and which Giorgio wears as a weather signal for a rainy
afternoon, although the morning sky may be cloudless. All gondoliers
are good weather prophets.
The entire family help Giorgio with the tenda—the old mother
carrying the side-curtains, warm from her flat-iron, and chubby
Beppo, bareheaded and barefooted, bringing up the rear with the
little blue streamer that on gala days floats from the gondola’s lamp-
socket forward, which on other days is always filled with flowers.
Then we are off, picking our way down the narrow canal, waiting
here and there for the big barcos to pass, laden with wine or fruit,
until we shoot out into the broad waters of the Giudecca.
You see at a glance that Venice is astir. All along the Zattere, on
every wood-boat, barco, and barge, on every bridge, balcony, and
house-top, abreast the wide fondamenta fronting the great
warehouses, and away down the edge below the Redentore, the
people are swarming like flies. Out on the Giudecca, anchored to the
channel spiles, is a double line of boats of every conceivable
description, from a toy sandolo to a steamer’s barge. These lie
stretched out on the water like two great sea-serpents, their heads
facing the garden, their tails curving toward the Redentore.
Between these two sea-monsters, with their flashing scales of a
thousand umbrellas, is an open roadway of glistening silver.
Giorgio swings across to the salt warehouses above the Dogana and
on down and over to the Riva. Then there is a shout ahead, a red
and white tenda veers a point, comes close, backs water, and the
Professor springs in.
“Here, Professor, here beside me on the cushions,” I call out. “Draw
back the curtains, Giorgio. And, Espero, hurry ahead and secure a
place near the stake-boat. We will be there in ten minutes.”
The Professor was a sight to cheer the heart of an amateur
yachtsman out for a holiday. He had changed his suit of the morning
for a small straw hat trimmed with red, an enormous field-glass with
a strap over his shoulder, and a short velvet coat that had once done
service as a smoking-jacket. His mustachios were waxed into needle
points. The occasion had for him all the novelty of the first spring
meeting at Longchamps, or a race off Cowes, and he threw himself
into its spirit with the gusto of a boy.
“What colors are you flying, mon Capitaine? Blue? Never!” noticing
Giorgio’s streamer. “Pasquale’s color is blue, and he will be half a
mile astern when Pietro is round the stake-boat. Vive le jaune! Vive
Pietro!” and out came a yellow rag—Pietro’s color—bearing a strong
resemblance to the fragment of some old silk curtain. It settled at a
glance all doubt as to the Professor’s sympathies in the coming
contest.
The day was made for a regatta; a cool, crisp, bracing October day;
a day of white clouds and turquoise skies, of flurries of soft winds
that came romping down the lagoon, turned for a moment in play,
and then went scampering out to sea; a day of dazzling sun, of
brilliant distances, of clear-cut outlines, black shadows, and flashing
lights.
As we neared the Public Garden the crowd grew denser; the cries of
the gondoliers were incessant; even Giorgio’s skillful oar was taxed
to the utmost to avoid the polluting touch of an underbred sandolo, or
the still greater calamity of a collision—really an unpardonable sin
with a gondolier. Every now and then a chorus of yells, charging
every crime in the decalogue, would be hurled at some landsman
whose oar “crabbed,” or at some nondescript craft filled with “barbers
and cooks,” to quote Giorgio, who in forcing a passage had become
hopelessly entangled.
The only clear water-space was the ribbon of silver beginning away
up near the Redentore, between the tails of the two sea-monsters,
and ending at the stake-boat. Elsewhere, on both sides, from the
Riva to San Giorgio, and as far as the wall of the Garden, was a
dense floating mass of human beings, cheering, singing, and
laughing, waving colors, and calling out the names of their favorites
in rapid crescendo.
The spectacle on land was equally unique. The balustrade of the
broad walk of the Public Garden was a huge flower-bed of
blossoming hats and fans, spotted with myriads of parasols in full
bloom. Bunches of over-ripe boys hung in the trees, or dropped one