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

Trompe l’œil imagery: Irma, ou les malheurs d’une jeune orpheline

Thanks to the astute detective work of participants in the October 2009 “Teachers as Scholars” seminar on the French Revolution, another tantalizing instance of trompe l’œil imagery has been unveiled. Look carefully at the folds of Irma’s dress, near her right leg, and you will see an angry head jutting forward toward the tomb.
Given that the story ends with a macabre account of Robespierre’s ghost haunting the catacombs in Paris and devouring the remains of his victims, perhaps this furious demonic-looking face is supposed to represent the infamous terrorist himself. It would make sense, as this image captures the final scene of the first edition of Irma, where Irma (anagram of Marie, sole survivor of the royal family) is reunited with her betrothed, the Duc d’Angoulême, and takes a vow to marry him over the tomb of Louis XVI.

This frontispiece is found in Elisabeth Guénard (Méré, madame Brossin de). Irma, ou les malheurs d’une jeune orpheline ; histoire indienne, avec des romances. Publié par la Ce. Gd. A Delhy et se trouve à Paris : Chez l’auteur, An VIII (1799-1800). University of Notre Dame: Rare Books Small PQ 1987.G45.I7.1799z. vol. 1.

Trompe-l’œil: a metaphysics of observing

After visiting the exhibit, “Une image peut en cacher une autre” at the Grand Palais yesterday, I realized that the the popularity of “The Mysterious Urn” (posted on 5/13/09) relied not only on political sympathies, but also on a way of seeing.  This imagery rewards the observer who looks beyond the obvious for vestiges or hints of other realities.  Like the exhibit artworks, the trompe-l’œil invites and in fact trains the eye to reverse black/white and scrutinize the contours, the blank spaces, the silences, for what might lie behind them.  The “Mysterious Urn” points to a metaphysics of observing, as well as a politics of mourning.  Note how the sunrays backlighting the “Mysterious Urn” illuminate the otherwise static seated figure and cast an expectant air on the scene, as if the Almighty were effecting some kind of miracle before our eyes.  Hopes for the king’s eventual martyrdom relied on a leap of faith (or credulous imagination) similar to those hopes that buoyed the heartbroken people who attended popular fantasmagoria shows after the Terror, and paid to bring loved ones back to life, if only for a moment, in a flimsy flickering image on a poorly-lit wall…

The fantasmagoria show pictured here is from Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques et anecdotiques d’un physicien-aéronaute, tome 1 : « La Fantasmagorie ». Éditeur : Cafe Clima (2000), where you will find many accounts of such events, and their effects on the spellbound audiences.  For an eloquent analysis of our attraction to this kind of image/spectacle, see Max Milner, La Fantasmagorie : essai sur l’optique fantastique, Paris, PUF, 1982.  A good, short account of this phenomenon is in Marie Lechner, ”Les médias disparus,” Libération.fr (August 2008).

Memory, spectacle, wishing, and grief… in a society wracked by trauma these words and feelings  interpenetrate and saturate the imaginary.  The codified genre of mysterious urns and weeping willows  functions like the literary genre of  “élégide”: ”C’est un récit poétique, nécessairement plaintif et possiblement merveilleux, d’une passion, c’est-à-dire d’une souffrance.” [a poetic account, necessarily plaintive and possibly marvelous, of a passion, that is, of suffering.  --J.J Regnault-Warin, L'Ange des prisons (1817).]

What other kinds of codified, trompe-l’œil, layered memorials existed in the post-revolutionary period?

Pity and its adversaries

Villette, “Something to Reflect Upon for the Crowned Jugglers,” 1793.

Is emotion political?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined pity as a profoundly human emotion.

Why did revolutionary thought associate pity with weakness, manipulation, and deceit?

I am currently preparing a lecture,  « La Pitié et ses adversaires :  La politique de l’émotion dans les écrits révolutionnaires» to be presented at « Emotions et puissance de la littérature » conference at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm, Paris, June 12, 2009.

The lecture builds upon my research on the pamphlets, fictions, and correspondence on the King’s demise following his ill-fated attempt to flee the country in 1791, and considers these materials in the light of the history of “emotives” outlined in William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling (Cambridge UP, 2001) and “Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions,” Current Anthropology 38 (June 1977).

The fall of Louis XVI is an excellent case to test Reddy’s claims that 1) sincerity is culturally managed; and that 2) “emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power” (NF, 111; “AC,” 335).  My study explores how authors described and criticized who could be a rightful recipient of pity at three key moments in the political history of the French Revolution:  1791, 1800-01, and 1803.  Not only was the king’s  sincerity and legitimacy radically challenged after he was arrested in June 1791 at Varennes, he also lost the right to people’s pity.  Most intriguing from a literary perpective is the contrast  between Regnault-Warin’s novel, Le Cimetière de la Madeleine, and the king’s correspondence (1803, ed. Helen-Maria Williams).  Whereas the former presents an explicitly sympathetic reaction to the king’s fate, mirroring through a number of mise en abyme techniques the desired reader’s response, the latter repeatedly challenges the king’s claims of sincerity and efforts to elicit pity with an ironic series of editorial ”commentaries.” 

Death of Louis XVI, King of France

In updating this message tonight, after posting the ”Weird Liaisons” article earlier today, I was struck by my own insensitivity to the man known as Louis XVI.  Surely the decapitated head above is just as offensive as the Dolce & Gabbana imagery of bloody victims?   How quick we are to dismiss a person–because of his or her status, creed, or color–as unfitting of basic human pity and kindness.  I have thus posted this sympathetic English icon of Louis’s execution to render homage to another facet of his memory.  Tyrant or timid, dull or deliberate, Louis XVI was no monster, and his memory deserves a more dignified tribute than Villette’s grotesquerie.

The Mysterious Urn: what does it mean?

What is the urn’s mystery: Cautious hope of a Bourbon resurrection and melodrama over the thwarted tomb? Or an attempt at reconciliation by republicans tormented by past brutality and seeking expiation in the realm of the imagination?

(Hint:  Look in the tree’s branches, and at the sides of the urn, to see the hidden profiles of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, Mme Elisabeth, and the two royal children.)

Some guidance to this imagery may be found in Richard Taws, “Trompe l’oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory after the Terror,” Oxford Art Journal 30, 3 (2007): 355-76.

Cobbsian Historiography Takes on the Revolutionary State

Douthwaite review essay of Joseph Clarke, Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France (Cambridge U Press, 2007) and Howard G. Brown, Ending the Revolution (U Virginia Press, 2006), in Eighteenth-Century Studies 42, 3 (Spring 2009): 468-471.