More on Vik Muniz and Marat: a retraction

This article continues the debate over Vik Muniz’s reappropriation of Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Marat (1793) in his 2008 series, “Pictures of Garbage” which was featured in the hit documentary by Lucy Walker, Waste Land (2010).
In my March 11, 2012 posting, I wrote: “By now, Santos has likely learned that Marat was more than just ‘an intellectual’ (the only adjective used by Muniz to describe him in the film). I wonder if he still appreciates the connection? And I wonder if Muniz regrets yoking his friend to this villain of international disrepute?”
On March 22, 2012, I had the good fortune to receive an email reply from Mr. dos Santos in response to this question, via his agent Diana Gabanyi. I hereby admit I was wrong. Santos does not regret being featured as Marat, in fact he relishes the connection!
An article forthcoming in Martial Poirson’s book on the French Revolution in global popular culture today will lay out all the details. (“Les martyres de Marat et de Sebastião: Une légende révolutionnaire mise à jour.”) Until then, I have only one thing to say: Marat est mort, vive Marat!

Robespierre the fop

Maximilien Robespierre, born May 6, 1758, has been accused of many things but rarely has “fop” been among them.* Yet what other adjective comes to mind when one reads the following letter, which was penned by Robespierre to Adélaide Labille-Guiard in February 1791 ?! The letter is his reply to Mme Labille-Guiard’s request to paint his portrait. At that time, she was painting a series of portraits in pastel of deputies to the National Assembly.

Paris, 13 février 1791.
On m’a dit que les Grâces voulaient faire mon portrait. Je serais trop indigne d’une telle faveur si je n’en avais senti tout le prix. Cependant, puisqu’un surcroît d’embarras et d’affaires ou puisqu’un Dieu jaloux ne m’a pas permis de leur témoigner jusqu’ici tout mon empressement, il faut que mes excuses précèdent les hommages que je leur dois. Je les prie donc de vouloir bien agréer les unes et de m’indiquer où je pourrais leur présenter les autres.

Robespierre’s defenders may point out that this poetic and somewhat pompous language—calling his lady correspondent “The Graces” and suggesting that a “jealous God” was hindering his activities—was standard fare in late eighteenth-century upper-class society. But that is just the point! Robespierre was like many others of his day, an ambitious, somewhat foppish young provincial seeking fame (if not fortune) in the new Assembly. He was unexceptional, and his flattery of Mme Labille-Guiard is uninspired.

In the Salon of September 1791, Mme Labille-Guillard exhibited her pastel portrait of Robespierre to the public. Although it was deemed realistic (“toujours de la vérité”), critics scorned the choice of pastels to immortalize the young deputy. “Auriez-vous par hasard mesuré leur gloire à l’éclat fugitif de ces couleurs. Ah ! peignez un Robespierre à l’huile, » wrote La Béquille de Voltaire.

Mme Labille-Guiard’s portrait of Robespierre is lost, but the replica I’ve reproduced here is said to be a close copy. Note the young deputy’s lacy sleeves, his silky jabot and cravat, and the tight-fitting vest and redingote. Note the smile flitting across his face. He looks pleased as punch.

This hardly seems to be the same man as the tight-lipped L’Incorruptible of ill-repute. I offer this reflection as a belated birthday tribute to Mr. Robespierre, lest we forget that this enigmatic man was many things and may remain forever beyond our ken. In his early years at the Assembly, as this letter and portrait attest, he was still quite attuned to the dandy-ish standards of ancien régime court society. And you must admit, he acted a bit like a fop.

*Fop: a man who is preoccupied with and often vain about his clothes and manners; a dandy.

References are from Anne Marie Passez, Adélaide Labille-Guiard, 1749-1803: Biographie et catalogue raisonné de son oeuvre (Paris : Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1973), pp. 247-50.

Marat returns to the the people via Vik Muniz

The work of Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz brings the career of revolutionary rabble-rouser Jean-Paul Marat to his rightful end.
According to an article by Carol Kino in the New York Times, Mr. Muniz’s art builds on his early experience in the tenements of Rio to give back to the people. As he explains in the documentary, “Waste Land,” Muniz aims to ennoble the catadores (garbage pickers) of Rio slums by creating classical portraits in their image. He models the portraits in his studio with their help, using garbage they have scavenged from a junkyard, and he pays them for their time and the materials. In the portrait featured here, we see Mr. Tião Santos, president of a workers’ cooperative (Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho), sitting in a bathtub like David’s “Death of Marat” (1793) awash in a sea of filthy clothes, plastic bottles and abandoned toilet seats. The $50,000 proceeds from this modern remake of David were donated by Mr. Muniz to the worker’s cooperative. What a perfect example of an artwork that meets–and gives new meaning–to life. Ashes to ashes, sewer to junkyard… L’ami du peuple would have been proud.

Au Père Tranquille and Louis XVI : trompe l’œil or coincidence ?

Have you ever noticed…
that the sign for Paris restaurant Au Père Tranquille bears a striking resemblance to the profile of Louis XVI? … except that Louis is rarely represented with a smile.
Is this a mere coincidence, or another case of the hidden profile trompe l’œil we have seen elsewhere?
Au Père Tranquille is a veritable institution in the neighborhood of Les Halles. The brasserie has occupied this spot (16 rue Pierre Lescot, 1er) since the end of the 19th century, when a strong conservative backlash brought Catholicism and tradition back into style. (Perhaps the smile is his revenge on those republicans who had suppressed the Catholic, royalist past for such a long time?) This restaurant has seen many changes nearby, from the old market Les Halles de Paris, and the present Forum des Halles and, it appears, the Nouveau Forum des Halles to be constructed next year, despite the citizens’ complaints and demonstrations (see our article of May 2010, “Can activism save the trees of Les Halles?”)
What other restaurants–in Paris or elsewhere in France–bear signs hearkening back to revolutionary history? Stand by for more postings to come…

Memoirs of Terror: a new spin on the cause célèbre

My recent reading has uncovered an interesting connection: memoirs of the Reign of Terror (1793-94) are clearly indebted to and sometimes written by the same people who penned the famous causes célèbres of the Old Regime judiciary. One writer who lived in both worlds, and achieved a certain literary fame right after the end of the Terror in what is called the Thermidorian period, is Pierre-Anne-Louis de Maton de La Varenne (1761-1813). A well-respected lawyer and member of the Parlement de Paris, Maton de La Varenne gained early fame during the Revolution for his espousal of civil status for the family of the executioner Sanson, but was arrested during a purge of suspected royalists and imprisoned in La Force right before the massacres of September 2-3, 1792. Maton de La Varenne’s memoirs, published in 1795, focus primarily on the grisly events of September 1792 when the Jacobins, under orders from Marat and Robespierre (according to Maton), orchestrated the mass slaughter of thousands of clergy and royalist sympathizers being held in Paris prisons.
Like the mémoires judiciaires penned by the author during his former life, his memoir uses the literary technique of dramatic suspense and revelation in the service of political persuasion. Minute by minute and paragraph by paragraph, the reader relives the prisoner’s anguish as he hears the shrieks of the dying amid the metallic clink of axes falling, and cringes at the heavy tread of the guards outside his cell. When his own turn arrives, the author dexterously shields his royalist tendencies from sight, citing the personal integrity he had developed through years in the legal profession as proof of his innocence to a dumbfounded judge and awe-struck crowd of murderers. His narration of leaving the make-shift tribunal stages a melodramatic coupling of Good and Evil that is mirrored in the gory frontispiece to the book (See illustration):

I cringed in horror at the sight of an enormous pile of naked cadavers lying in the gutter, filthy with blood and mud, upon which I had to take an oath. … I was saying the words they demanded from me, when one of my former clients fortuitously passed by. He recognized me, swore for me, embraced me a thousand times, and even brought the killers to my side. (1)

Note how the good lawyer avoids sullying his honor by sidestepping the oath, and how he is saved by a symbol of his former power (a satisfied client of the royal court). Right and Wrong, Good and Evil are clearly legible in this text, and reveal its debt to the mémoires judiciaires.
That genre, as Sarah Maza has noted, deftly employs the melodramatic mode to go beyond an obvious appeal to readers’ or viewers’ hunger for strong sensations: it works to visualize and simplify morality. (2) The stark juxtaposition of a weirdly calm Marat pontificating in front of his murderous butchers, while the cautious lawyer picks his way out of the fray, build upon the melodramatic urge to assign unambiguous moral labels to situations fraught with political complexity.
Les Crimes de Marat went through three editions in 1795; most interesting to us are the successive editorial changes Maton de La Varennes made to his book, because they reveal how a death threat, and the alarm it spawned, were employed to confer authenticity and political urgency on his work. Psychological manipulation of readers was widely and effectively employed in Thermidorian fiction; it may explain for some of the upsurge in novel reading after the Terror. Maton de la Varenne claims that one person was so enraged on reading the first edition of Les Crimes, and seeing the name of a friend amid the list of ignominious deputies who egged on the September massacres, that she announced: “I will be for the author another CHARLOTTE CORDAY.” Although he suppressed G…’s name in this edition, and admits taken precautions against his would-be assassin’s “pretty project,” Maton de la Varenne also enlists the reader on his side, and cites a stirring quote from Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois to defend their freedom of speech from persecutors. Dire threats raise book sales, as we know. The death threat against the author may very well have revved up sales of his other two books advertised on the inside cover of Les Crimes…

(1) P.A.L. Maton de La Varenne, Les Crimes de Marat et des autres égorgeurs, ou Ma résurrection (Paris : Chez André, An III (1795). (available on-line via Gallica, catalogue of the BNF, Paris)
(2) Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs : The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

New books in revolutionary history, politics, and art

On Jean-Clément Martin, ed., La Révolution à l’œuvre; Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution; and Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes.

The best academic writers tread a fine line. On the one hand, they must be meticulous and careful, buttressing claims with close readings and archival findings. On the other hand, they should aspire to engage readers and spark interest by providing innovative syntheses and contributing to ongoing debates. This feat is made more difficult by the vogue for case studies. Like a scholarly politique de bascule, there seems to be a reaction underway against the previous generation’s enthrallment with grand theories; call it the “new positivism.” Although admirable, the sheer volume of information produced by positivists can feel distracting to readers, raw and indigeste. The books reviewed here reflect the excitement of archival discovery, but they prove more challenged by the scholar’s duty of marshaling accumulated evidence to prove a point. Their stores of knowledge are a wonder to behold, yet the minutiae sometimes overwhelm. A bit of pruning might have shaped this work to better effect, and saved a few trees as well.

In an arresting opener, Michael Sonenscher states: “This book is about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in the French Revolution” yet a footnote to this first sentence warns: “It is also an attempt to correct some of the gaps or mistakes” in three earlier publications by Sonenscher. “It is also a book about Rousseau,” Sonenscher continues, “and, no less centrally, a book about salons,” whose aim is to “open up a way towards the real political history of the French Revolution”: in other words, how ancient republican politics conjoined with modern debt-based economics so that the latter became seen as the means to revive the former (1, 3, our emphasis). This breathless overture, which confidently takes on a number of seemingly unrelated and extremely complex topics, is emblematic of Sonenscher’s style. Sonenscher’s insights into the moral and economic history of pre-revolutionary France are wide-ranging and extremely well-documented; few can rival his breadth. Some of his findings, for example, on Robespierre’s proto-socialist ideas of using public finance to reimburse citizens for contributions to political life, cast revolutionary politics in surprising new lights (53). But there exists so much detail that the narrative movement sometimes runs aground.
[…]
A sense of energy emerges also from Jean-Clément Martin’s aptly entitled volume, La Révolution à l’œuvre. In stressing the artisanal way that scholars craft their research into print (à l’œuvre means “at work,” as in a workshop), Martin sets the stage for an erudite overview of trends in revolutionary history, especially political, institutional, international, and art history. Coining the term transversalité to underscore these cross-currents, Martin’s introduction describes eighteenth-century studies in France today. Most surprising to Anglo-American readers will be the sense of newness, even trepidation, that French scholars express about approaching topics that we consider mainstays of intellectual discourse, particularly gender studies and colonial relations.
[…]
Of the three books reviewed, Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohl effect the most successful synthesis of detail and argumentation in their co-written Vizualizing the Revolution. The book’s exquisite production value—with 187 illustrations, 46 in color—its luxuriously heavy paper stock, and extensive bibliography make this volume a must for anyone seeking new insights into the pictorial culture of 1789-99. Moreover, where most art historians (such as those reviewed by Bordes in La Révolution à l’œuvre) focus on a single genre, artist, or political tendency, Reichardt and Kohl’s “communicative and discursive” approach allows them to reveal the interplay between a dizzying variety of works, especially “lower” forms of art such as prints, and the elite, religious, and folk traditions from which they emerged. By zeroing in on icons such as Hercules, martyrs, and the new man, the authors pull off an amazing synthesis that demonstrates the continuity between Old Regime and Modernity, and proves the importance of “popular” art in that transition.
[…]
Although our scholarly infatuation for the trees of detail and minutiae remains strong, with guides like the authors reviewed here, the revolutionary forest is assuming startling new contours that should inspire more travelers to venture within. A bon entendeur, salut!

From review essay by J. Douthwaite, “On Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Finding a Way through Revolutionary Politics, History, and Art,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, 2 (Winter 2010): 259-66.

Jean-Clément Martin, ed. La Révolution à l’œuvre: Perspectives actuelles dans l’histoire de la Révolution française. Rennes. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005, 375pp. 22.00 €
Rolf Reichardt and Hubertus Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-Century France. London. Reaktion Books, 2008. 294 pp. $45.00
Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution. Princeton. Princeton University Press, 2008. 493pp. $45.00

Juicy Couture does Marie-Antoinette

Marie-Antoinette mania strikes again, in a recent ad for Juicy Couture fashion and fragrance. What on earth could this image really mean? The teeny bopper with the pink Antoinettesque hairdo and avian companion seem an unlikely combination… unless one recalls the popularity of such portraits in eighteenth-century high society, and the delightfully wicked connotations associated with the death of a girl’s pet bird (as seen here in Greuze’s famous “Jeune fille qui pleure son oiseau mort”). Whereas the innocence of the Old Regime flew the coop long ago, it is amusing to see how the advertising world in the USA keeps the memory alive, and how the tale of the naughty queen and her coterie is ever reinvented in the hopes of selling luxury to a society of plebs.

The wizardry of Oz, 2: Echoes of Robespierre?

Have you ever noticed the political echoes between the Wizard of Oz and Robespierre? Consider these similarities: 1) In the L. Frank Baum novel, the Wizard of Oz obliges all inhabitants of the Emerald City to wear green-tinted spectacles because, as the guard explains to Dorothy upon her arrival at the gates, “if you did not wear spectacles the brightness and glory of the Emerald City would blind you. … They are locked on, for Oz so ordered it when the City was first built” (117). 2) Robespierre himself always wore green-tinted glasses, according to his biographer Ruth Schurr (Fatal Purity, 12). 3) When he is unveiled at the end, Baum’s Wizard admits he is a humbug and reveals the tricks he has used to fool observers into believing in his power (ventriloquism, optical illusions, hot air balloon technology), his reclusive habits, and fear of being revealed. But his original rise to prominence, he insists, was something of an accident; as he notes, “I found myself in the midst of a strange people, who, seeing me come from the clouds, thought I was a great Wizard. Of course I let them think so, because they were afraid of me, and promised to do anything I wished them to” (187). The Wizard’s final words underline his goodness. In response to Dorothy’s exclamation, “I think you are a very bad man,” he replies: “Oh no, my dear; I’m really a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.” (189). 4) Robespierre’s speech to the Jacobins on November 21, 1793 reveals a similar mix of grandiloquence and humility. Defending his notion of a great Being who watches over the people, he describes himself as a “poor sort of Catholic,” but insists that his aim is true: “I have never cooled in my friendship for, or failed in my championship of, my fellow men. Indeed, I have only grown more wedded to the moral and political ideas that I have expressed … The French people pins its faith, not on its priests, nor on any superstition, or any ceremony, but on worship as such–that is to say, upon the conception of an incomprehensible power, which is at once a source of confidence to the virtuous and of terror to the criminal” (cited in Shurr, 194).
These echoes may be fortuitious; the landscape of 19th-century America abounded with tyrants and tricksters, to be sure. Nevertheless, it is intriguing to note the reverberations that echo between the sentiment and populism of the Wizard of Oz and the so-called Charlatan of the Terror.
Works cited (and sources of illustrations):
Ruth Schurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (NY: Henry Holt, 2006).
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (repr. of 1900 edition; Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Media Group LLC, 2003).

Reflections on women of the Revolution, by Julie Congdon

This comment just in, from TAS participant Julie Congdon, who contributed an arresting poster featuring famous women of the French Revolution and some of their most memorable words. She writes, “Since many women played an instrumental role behind the scenes (and a few at the forefront) of the American Revolution, I wanted to research the women who were key figures prior to and during the French Revolution. What would be the repercussions of the choices they made? With the massive bloodshed and executions that were taking place at the time, who was brave enough to stand for their beliefs? Many of the women depicted in the poster paid the ultimate price for the decisions they made, thus the placement of the guillotine by their picture.”
by Julie Congdon, Technology Lab Facilitator, LaSalle Intermediate Academy, South Bend, IN

A question of rights, by Cynthia MacWhorter

Cynthia MacWhorter participated in the 2009 Teachers as Scholars program on “The French Revolution: A Cultural Approach” (10/6 & 10/13/09). The creative project she contributed is a painting in grisaille of Marie-Antoinette juxtaposed, over whirling cloud-like brush strokes, against images of Robespierre, the halls of Versailles, the National Assembly, and the guillotine. The text on the painting reads: “October 16, 1793: What was her crime, really? Born, wrong place, wrong time? Totally clueless? Married a guy equally clueless? Not French?”
This commentary accompanies the painting: “Due to the fact that the revolution was all about human rights, I felt I wanted to address the lack of rights granted to the many persons who lost their lives due to who they were by birth. Obviously they were not totally innocent of ignorance, respect for the plight of thousands of deprived individuals and a lack of understanding which they probably could have remedied, but as I am opposed to captital punishment for even the worst criminals in contemporary society, I wanted to draw (with paint) attention to the young Queen and her plight.”
Cynthia MacWhorter, Art teacher, St. Joseph High School, South Bend, IN