The Revolution Takes Form: Art and the Barricade in Nineteenth-Century France [1 ed.] 0271095490, 9780271095493

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Jordan Marc Rose

THE

REVOLUTION TAKES FORM

Art and the Barricade in Nineteenth-Century France

The Revolution Takes Form

The Revolution Takes Form Art and the Barricade in Nineteenth-Century France

Jordan Marc Rose

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rose, Jordan Marc, author. Title: The revolution takes form : art and the barricade in nineteenth-century France / Jordan Marc Rose. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references. Summary: “Examines the emergence and stabilization of the barricade as a symbol of revolution in mid-nineteenth-century France”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023039451 | ISBN 9780271095493 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Rose, Jordan Marc. | Barricades (Military science) in art. | Revolutions in art. | Art, French—19th century—Themes, motives. Classification: LCC N8217.B358 R67 2024 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2023039451

Copyright © 2024 Jordan Marc Rose All rights reserved Printed in Lithuania Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Contents List of Illustrations  vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction  1 1 Trivial and Terrible Reality  19 2 This Is Not a Program  42 3 A Monstrous Pile of Men and Stone  71 4 Between Past and Future  99 Afterword  142

Notes 147 Bibliography 158 Index 165

Illustrations 1. Hippolyte Bellangé, Eh bien oui . . . ! Charbonnier est maître chez lui, 1830 2 2. Bellangé, Seulement de l’eau rougie, la petite mère (29 Juillet 1830), 1830  7 3. Auguste Raffet, Tirez sur les chefs et les chevaux. Jeune gens ...f..tez vous du reste (28 Juillet 1830), 1830  7

16. Daumier, Gargantua, 1831  24 17. J.-J. Grandville, L’Ordre règne à Varsovie, 1831 30 18. Grandville, L’Ordre publique règne aussi à Paris, 1831  30 19. Victor Schnetz, Combat de l’Hôtel-deVille, le 28 juillet 1830, 1833–34  31

4. Bellangé, Eh ben, as tu touché Jean Louis? Ah dam j’scais pas . . . ma foi j’ai tiré dans l’tas (28 Juillet 1830), 1830  8

20. Horace Vernet, L’Arrivée du duc d’Orléans au Palais Royal, dans la soirée du 30 juillet 1830, 1834  32

5. Bellangé, est de deux! . . . . . . . vive la charte (28 Juillet 1830), 1830  8

21. Daumier, Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834 37

6. Honoré Daumier, L’Épicier qui n’était pas bête . . . , 1830  9

22. Auguste Préault, Tuerie ( fragment épisodique d’un grand bas-relief ), 1834/1851 43

7. Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, L’Allocution (28 juillet 1830), 1830  9 8. Philippe-Auguste Jeanron, Les Petits Patriotes, 1831  10 9. Eugène Delacroix, Le 28 juillet 1830: La Liberté guidant le peuple, 1831  12 10. Joseph Beaume and Charles Mozin, Attaque de l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris, le 28 juillet 1830, 1831  13 11. Hippolyte Lecomte, Combat de la rue de Rohan, 1831  13 12. Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse, 1819  14 13. Delacroix, detail of La Liberté guidant le peuple (fig. 9)  16

23. Caravaggio, The Kiss of Judas, ca. 1602 47 24. Anne-Louis Girodet, Les Ombres des héros français reçues par Ossian dans l’Elysée, 1802  48 25. Antoine-Jean Gros, La Bataille d’Eylau, 1808 49 26. Géricault, detail of Le Radeau de la Méduse (fig. 12)  50 27. Préault, detail of Tuerie (fig. 22)  51 28. Préault, detail of Tuerie (fig. 22)  53 29. Préault, detail of Tuerie (fig. 22)  53 30. Jeanron, Scène de Paris, 1833  65

14. Daumier, Dieu mène la France 20

31. Jean Gigoux, after Tuerie, 1834  69

15. Daumier, Un héros de juillet, mai 1831 23

32. Ernest Meissonier, Souvenir de guerre civile, 1849–50  72

33. Édouard de Beaumont and Eugène Cicéri, Barricade de la rue Clovis, 1848  80 34. N.-E. Gabé, Prise du Panthéon, 1849  81

46. Daumier, Projet d’une médaille 112 47. Ange-Louis Janet ( Janet-Lange), La République, 1848  115

35. M. L. Bosredon, Ça c’est pour l’ennemi du dehors, pour le dedans, voici comment l’on combat loyalement les adversaires, 1848 81

48. Jules-Claude Ziegler, La République, 1848 115

36. Meissonier, La Barricade, 1848  83

50. Andrea del Sarto, Caritas, 1518  120

37. Meissonier, study for Souvenir de guerre civile, 1848–50  87

51. Daumier, Une foule, ca. 1848  121

38. Meissonier, study for Souvenir de guerre civile, 1848–50  87 39. Meissonier, detail of Souvenir de guerre civile (fig. 32)  90 40. Daumier, L’Émeute, ca. 1848–52  105 41. Daumier, Ouvriers dans la rue, ca. 1846–48 109

49. Daumier, La République, 1848  117

52. Daumier, Famille sur la barricade, ca. 1848 122 53. Daumier, detail of L’Émeute (fig. 40) 130 54. Daumier, Les Fugitifs, ca. 1848/49  133 55. Daumier, Les Fugitifs, 1852–55  133 56. Daumier, Les Fugitifs, ca. 1868  134

42. Daumier, Le Meunier, son fils et l’âne, 1849 109

57. Daumier, detail of Les Fugitifs (fig. 54) 136

43. Daumier, Le Gamin de Paris aux Tuileries 111

58. Daumier, L’Émeute, ca. 1848–50  138

44. Daumier, Tout est perdu! fors la caisse 111 45. Daumier, Dernier conseil des ex-ministres 111

( viii )  illustrations

59. Daumier, Camille Desmoulins au Palais-Royal, ca. 1850  139 60. Daumier, detail of L’Émeute (fig. 58) 140 61. Préault, Eugène Delacroix, 1864  143

Preface This book draws inspiration from the introduction Friedrich Engels wrote for the second edition of Karl Marx’s Class Struggles in France. The essay, which Engels composed in the spring of 1895, has two goals: on the one hand, to affirm the applicability of Marx’s “materialist conception” to the examination of contemporary history,1 and on the other, to advance an argument for the reorganization of revolutionary tactics around the franchise. The one is corollary to the other. Ever since its publication, Engels’s introduction has been described, by friend and foe alike, as a “testament” to reformist policy.2 In a sense it is. The path to revolutionary transformation, Engels proposes, begins with the vote. This outlook, however, shifts almost immediately: the vote illuminates, Engels says, but it does not emancipate. Only the myths of “vulgar democracy” state otherwise.3 The vote is an instrument; it measures numbers. Understood as such, the vote appears, when cast, as a sign, or a signal. It operates on the level of perception. Of course, Engels admits, legality has its limits. Eduard Bernstein’s “revisionism” is not gospel. Street fights will come. But this time, Engels pleads, let’s fight a majority revolution. Begin with the majority. Only then, he wagers, will the compositional errors of the past be corrected; only then will it become possible to overcome the material and technological advantages of the army. Social democracy has an organizational role to play in the present. This role may become disagreeable or untenable tomorrow. At its core, Engels’s argument is about the form of revolution. And form, by nature, is unstable, contingent; it arises from the lived confrontations of the present. What appeared adequate yesterday may no longer be today. The same can be said of the instruments by means of which this form is expressed. Repertoires of collective action change, too.4 New tactics emerge, while others age out. In this regard, the experience of 1848, as recounted by Marx, strikes Engels as decisive. For that year, he avers, “the spell of the barricade” was broken.5 By this Engels does not mean that barricades will, or should, stop being built—indeed, he had already witnessed their spectacular return (and failure) in 1871. The question of the barricade, like the question of the vote, is a question about perception. Barricades succeed, Engels maintains, when they influence the soldier, shake his steadfastness, by bringing him into contact with the insurgent. This is the strategic value of the barricade; this is the interruption that ultimately matters. The delay, when compelling, reveals enemies as semblables. The effect produced is moral more than material.6 “The people” takes shape as one in the barricade.7 This is the power the barricade once exerted; it is also the source of its romanticism.

During the June Days of 1848, Engels says, “the people” appeared divided once and for all. On one side stood the forces of “industrial prosperity” (recently recouped and soon, after 1851, to grow exponentially), and on the other, “rebels, agitators, plunderers, levelers, the scum of society.”8 To the soldier, instructed that summer not to approach the barricade head on, the insurgent looked alien; he belonged to the army of a warring nation. The old shibboleths therefore ceased to apply. No longer did the barricade figure as a medium of communion. No longer did it mediate, put one side in contact— in the line of sight, in earshot—with the other. The “fraternal appeal” failed to find its audience.9 At that moment, the barricade lost its ability to present the social bases of contention as a res publica. Instead, it demonstrated “how impossible it was . . . to win social reconstruction by a simple surprise attack.”10 Future street fights, with or without barricades, would have to be disenchanted. The transformations consummated in 1848, as Engels understood them, were at root economic. Rather than remove capitalist production, the revolutions of that year prepared the ground for its expansion. The June Days rebellion and the reaction to it were conclusive in this respect. Here, Engels confesses to a critical error. In 1848 he and Marx misjudged the rate and capacity of economic development in Europe; the “ripening” of conditions they saw in the world trade crisis of 1847 proved an illusion.11 Instead, an “industrial revolution” went on to seize the whole of the Continent. Yet it was just this economic revolution, Engels notes, that “everywhere” and “for the first time” produced “clarity” in class relationships.12 Engels believed that in time this clarity would lead to victory. The language of periodization can be instructive here. The year 1848 closed the phase of development introduced in 1830 (for Engels and Marx, the 1830 revolution marked the transfer of power over the state from the landlords to the capitalists); at the same time, it launched the “great decisive struggle” between capital and labor.13 At this point, the barricade was all but done for. The primacy of production (time) had succeeded the primacy of circulation (space). The modernization of Paris between 1853 and 1870, with its displacements, subcontracts, cannon-shot boulevards, and other technologies of embourgeoisement, concretized the more general transformation underway. Evicted from the city’s center, the proletariat had to search for new forms of contestation commensurate with the new cycle of accumulation; it had to discover new vulnerabilities. The factory replaced the street as the principal site of struggle. Strike superseded riot.14 Viewed from this angle, the barricades of the Paris Commune, whose architects thought they could redress the mistakes of June 1848 by rationalizing construction and coordinating emplacements, assume a tragic appearance. Engels’s call for a change in tactics ought to be read as a response to the misunderstanding and consequent misapplication of effort. He, like Marx and Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray before him, puzzled over the Communards’ refusal to appropriate the Bank of France, ( x )  Preface

at the portals of which, instead, they paid reverence.15 “The bank in the hands of the Commune,” Engels explains, “this would have been worth more than ten thousand hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the whole of the French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in favor of peace with the Commune.” The barricade, in its “classic age,” was a transitional form. Its rise within the repertoire of collective action coincided with the early and decisive phase of capital’s subsumption of labor. This period, if we follow Engels, lacked the “clarity” of the one that emerged from it, out of it. Everything was at stake in the 1830s and 1840s. Slowly but surely a new society was taking shape. Its contours, however, were nowhere securely in place. Development remained uneven; crisis was characteristic. Engels’s remarks about the period’s lack of clarity indicate as much. The barricade figured the confusion. It made the moment of indecision matter. On the barricade, one stood between redemption and destruction. Both were possible. In his introduction, Engels does not address the barricade’s representation. His neglect is unfortunate; he misses an opportunity. For despite the tactic’s long history (Parisians had been building barricades at least since 1588), the extant visual record of the barricade does not begin until 1830.16 That is, the onset of the barricade’s “classic age” coincides with the birth of its image. Subsequently, the corpus of barricade imagery balloons, and a new grammar of democratic politics and political expression crystallizes around it. Visualization and spell are entwined; the one instantiates the other. After 1848, the two forms of appearance diverge. The publication of Auguste Blanqui’s Instructions pour une prise d’armes in 1868 is exemplary in this regard. There, the period’s most dreaded revolutionary (Marx once referred to Blanqui as “the brains and inspiration of the proletarian party in France”) depopulates the barricade in order to restore its usefulness.17 Revivals of the barricade in 1871, 1944, and 1968 could only be partial. My account of the barricade mirrors that of Engels. Instead of military realities, it deals in images. Each of its four chapters is organized around a single artwork: Honoré Daumier’s Rue Transnonain (1834), Auguste Préault’s Tuerie (1834), Ernest Meissonier’s Souvenir de guerre civile (1849–50), and Daumier’s L’Émeute (ca. 1848–52). Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple (1831), the most famous and recognizable of all barricade pictures, appears in the introduction. This is not a demotion. The four artworks I go on to examine in detail would have been inconceivable without the precedent set by Delacroix’s painting. La Liberté guidant le peuple is inaugural. I wish simply to emphasize this aspect of it. Of the four artworks at the core of my account, only one of them, Souvenir de guerre civile, describes the barricade in its particularity. The others do not. In these instances, the barricade operates, off stage, as an orientation; it precedes the work of Preface  ( xi )

art as a cognitive framework and organizing structure, a symbolic form that grounds the history I relate. By this I do not mean to fix the barricade at the outset as an a priori category of revolutionary experience in the 1830s and 1840s. Quite the contrary. The ideas and aspirations for which the barricade stands are realized in its multiple, often contradictory formations. As image, the barricade is expansive. It exceeds iconography. It exceeds genre. In my telling, it also exceeds medium. (L’Émeute and Souvenir de guerre civile are oil-on-canvas paintings; Tuerie is relief sculpture; Rue Transnonain is a lithograph.) Rue Transnonain and L’Émeute frame this study. The book could have been structured differently, and originally it was. The centrality of Daumier’s role came into focus gradually. Arranged as they now are, Rue Transnonain and L’Émeute reverse a familiar pattern in the nineteenth century. Massacre precedes riot. Aftermath precedes event. It is where we begin. The back-to-front ordering is not exclusive to Daumier’s pair of works; it repeats and intensifies across the book. Tuerie, which predates Rue Transnonain, and Souvenir de guerre civile, which postdates it, are also scenes of massacre. Massacre—massacre—massacre—riot: the progress of my account is conditioned by “afterness,” which sets its key.18 L’Émeute consequently appears in a new light. Its insurgent, his raised arm and fist borrowed from La Liberté guidant le peuple, advances (right to left!) against the grain of narrative unfolding. Failure, for him, has already been written. Daumier’s painting compels us, in turn, to contemplate the nonsynchronicity or misalignment of material reality and human intervention. It agonizes, inquisitively: which parts of the revolutionary past have been lost to us? Which can be salvaged? With L’Émeute, we dwell among the ruins of defeat.

( xii )  Preface

Acknowledgments While writing this book, I was fortunate to receive a Hellman Fellowship. The resources provided by the Hellman Foundation were essential to the book’s completion and production. A grant from the Faculty Career Development Program at my home institution, University of California, San Diego (UCSD), ensured I had adequate time to finalize the manuscript. Another grant, from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at UCSD, put early drafts of the book in the hands of those whose criticism mattered most. I am grateful for these three awards. I would like to thank Karen Hirschfeld for her assistance in preparing grant applications, as well as Cristina Della Colletta, Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at UCSD, and Ricardo Dominguez, Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at UCSD, for the reinforcements they generously supplied as the book neared its final stages. Many comrades and colleagues have contributed to the formation of this book. First and foremost, I want to thank Tim Clark and Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby. They were the book’s first audience and its deepest readers. They have also been its greatest champions. My debt to them is immeasurable. The late Susannah Barrows helped shape this project in its earliest days. I wish she could see it now. Others who came across this book in meaningful ways include Scott Ferguson, Elizabeth Ferrell, Norman Gendelman, Anthony Grudin, Edwin Harvey, Todd Olson, Debarati Sanyal, Mark Traugott, Sue Walker, and Helen Weston. I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Visual Arts at UCSD for their support over the years, especially Amy Adler, Norman Bryson, Yulia Bulanova, Jack Greenstein, Grant Kester, Laura Martin, Elizabeth Newsome, Kuiyi Shen, Bill Tronzo, Mariana Wardwell, John Welchman, and Alena Williams. Jonah Gray was the kind of research assistant we all hope for. Anonymous reader reports solicited by Penn State University Press helped make this a stronger book. I thank both readers for their encouragement, advice, and pointed criticism. I am immensely grateful to my editor, Ellie Goodman, whose clear-sighted stewardship, no-holds-barred honesty, and unwavering commitment to the project held the gremlins at bay. Every bit of correspondence I received from her ended, in characteristic fashion, on the same stirring note: Onward! I am also grateful to Maddie Caso for guiding the project though to its conclusion, to Laura Reed-Morrisson for her expert copyediting, and to the design team at PSU Press for producing a beautiful object.

Finally, I want to acknowledge Sona Desai. Her solidarity in all things has made these troubled times bearable. Thank you, love, for everything that you are. Parts of chapters 1 and 4, revised for the purpose, appeared in my chapter “Daumier and Method,” in The Present Prospects of Social Art History, ed. Anthony Grudin and Robert Slifkin (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021).

( xiv )  Acknowledgments

• Introduction Be not alarmed by your doubt. This doubt is already faith. Believe, and hope! Right, though postponed, will have its advent; it will come to sit in judgment on the dogma and on the world. And this day of Judgment will be called the Revolution. —Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, 1847

J

ust look at Hippolyte Bellangé’s lithograph Eh bien oui . . . ! Charbonnier est maître chez lui (fig. 1). Look how admirable its three protagonists appear, how formidable, with their arms around each other, one foot raised and planted on a barricade they built together. It is July 29, 1830. The revolution is over. Charles X has fallen. The man behind the collier (charbonnier) at center, the one doffing his top hat, lets us know the celebrations can begin. This time the Bourbon kings shall not return. In unison, the collier, National Guard, and student of the École Polytechnique peer to their right, beyond the two corpses at their feet and into a distance reserved for them alone. The future, which is this distance, exceeds the picture’s tondo; it defies representation hic et nunc. In a word, it promises to be new. The gamin pulled tight to the collier’s side tells us something about its possibilities. So, too, does the tricolor flying in the middle distance, its three equal parts bodied forth by the three revolutionaries. The message, here, is unambiguous. Out of this union arises a nation reformed. La Charte ou la mort (The Charter or death). The National Guard’s bearskin obscures nearly the entirety of the slogan inscribed across the tricolor’s middle section. Only “La Charte” remains legible in full. The erasure, no doubt, is meant to be another sign that the revolution has concluded, that it has been won, and that victory is tantamount to resurrection. That the Charter, which in 1814 restored the Bourbon Monarchy but also established the Chamber of Deputies, stands for compromise—that it merely limits monarchy—does not seem to bother Bellangé’s revolutionaries. It assures them that law,

Fig. 1  Hippolyte Bellangé, Eh bien oui . . . ! Charbonnier est maître chez lui, 1830. Lithograph, 41.1 × 37.2 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

both secular and reasoned, precedes monarchy: in effect, the right to rule cannot be separated from the will of “the people.” The Charter titles the monarch Head of State. It recognizes the rights of the individual and enshrines the right to property. It guarantees that the press will be free. All at once these concessions to the Revolution of 1789 were nullified when Charles X published his “Four Ordinances” on July 26. But this is not all that seems to be at stake. “Or death” is neither a neutral declaration nor a simple counterpoint. “Or death” is an ultimatum issued by those whom charters fail to represent—that is, “those who count for nothing.”1 The violence it thus bespeaks endangers the constitutionalism it takes as its opposite.2 “Or death” defines the right of insurrection as a natural right.3 It belongs to the language of 1793. The unity emblematized by the tricolor consequently turns on the refrain’s displacement, which in this instance also happens to be its literalization. Three corpses lie in the foreground of Bellangé’s lithograph, each of them cropped at the waist. Two appear without legs, one without torso, although we may wish to read the legs and torso on the left—the legs laid over the torso—as describing a single body and therefore revealing something characteristic about the body cut down by violence of this sort. For here, in this death, the body goes topsy-turvy. The point is not that Bellangé’s image diminishes the differences between the classes. Clearly it does not. The collier, dressed in the costume of his trade rather than his duty, appears out of step with the National Guard and the polytechnicien, his left leg raised while they stride with their right. The lithograph, in this way, makes room for the real substance of the historical situation in 1830, for an image of class at the moment of its codification. But it abstracts that substance. The contradictions Bellangé makes visible appear to have been resolved. This is why the collier must speak the lithograph’s caption. The order affirmed by the Charter depends on his desire to do so. Bellangé’s worker is as much “maître” as the others. The street, turned against itself, figures in Bellangé’s lithograph as the site and medium of social transformation. In opposition, the collier combines with the National Guard and the polytechnicien. Each of them has contributed a paving stone. A scrap of wood or a barrel or a cartwheel would also have sufficed; barricades are (and were) nondiscriminating constructions, provisional collections of everyday objects put to new purposes. Contingency is the rule. Together, the three men, worker and bourgeois, have reconstituted the nation; it is now, like them, self-made.4 Therein resides the first myth of revolution in the nineteenth century. The barricade, in 1830, appears as its most poignant and meaningful symbolic form. Few believed in this myth or expressed it with greater conviction and eloquence than the historian Jules Michelet, who, in 1831, linked the barricades of the 1830 revolution to the discovery of a “people.” “What distinguishes the July Revolution,” he maintained, introduction  ( 3 )

“is that it presented the first example of a revolution without heroes, without proper names; triumph belonged to no one in particular. Society did everything. The revolution of the fourteenth century was absolved and embodied in the Maiden of Orleans, a pure and affecting victim who represented the people and died for it. Here, not a proper name; no one planned it, no one led it; no one person eclipsed the others. After the victory, one searched for a hero; and one found a people.”5 History in its present form, which Michelet identified with the eternal struggle of “man against nature, mind against matter, liberty against fatality,” had reached its resolution.6 Or so Michelet concluded at the time, certain that among the ruins of these centuries-old structures of bondage he glimpsed the “social genius” of France and thus the presentiment of humanity’s full realization.7 Namelessness for Michelet had nothing to do with the nonsignifying, flattening sameness of anonymity. “The people” of 1830 was a social being, not a social category; its arrival, which announced the triumph of the nation over individualism, nullified social categories altogether. Everyone was peuple, Michelet insisted. In his eyes, the singularity of 1830 pertained to the whole it expressed, not the individual parts that constituted it. For these parts, he thought, were individual merely in appearance; their significance derived from their status as symbols of the unity they were striving to become.8 “I believe in the repose of the future.”9 For Michelet, the barricades of 1830 created a space for freedom, transfiguring the diffuse and scattered, by association, into a unity, many and one at the same time.10 In building these barricades, “the people” recognized itself as such; subsequently, it acted as such. Victor Hugo compared the occasion to a metamorphosis. “Yesterday you were only a mob,” he exclaimed. “You are a people today!”11 Hugo wanted this image of progress to strike a distinctive note. He was speaking on the anniversary of the insurrection of August 10, 1792, when thousands of sans-culottes—the mob of yesterday—stormed the Tuileries and deposed Louis XVI. Allusions to the radicalism of Years I and II were commonplace at the time (Bellangé’s “or death” was one of them), and the invocation almost always turned, as it does in Hugo, on the moderation and goodwill demonstrated by the revolutionaries of 1830. The July Days were “glorious”—this is the implication—because the illumination of reason subdued the “hideous smile” of vengeance, molding the disorder and incoherence of insurrection, the impetuous foule, into an “intelligent being,” a “conscience held in common,” in short, a politics.12 For Hugo and his ilk, the legitimacy of the July Revolution resided not in the recovery or fulfillment of 1789—the path from le 10 août to regicide and the Law of Suspects was one-way—but in its correction of 1789. This work of revision, as the title of one pamphlet declared, was the work of “the people”: La Révolution de 89 et 93, seconde édition revue et corrigée par le peuple en 1830.13

( 4 )  the revolution takes for m

Hugo’s conception of “the people” in 1830 had only a partial relation to Michelet’s messianic vision of redemption. The two “peoples” shared a point of origin. I have little doubt, however, that Michelet would have found the essential role Hugo assigned to politics—that is, Hugo’s mistrust of “the people”—dangerously contradictory, no less so than he found the principle of class struggle. Michelet’s “people” was formed by instinct; “universal sympathy” animated it.14 To insist otherwise, or to insist that “the people” belonged to anything other than itself, was, for the Michelet of 1831, to push against the grain of universal history. “One cannot strictly oppose the bourgeoisie to the people,” Michelet concluded, “ . . . which would result in the creation of two nations.”15 In the New Jerusalem, “the people” appeared undivided. It did not have enemies. Then as now, “the people” was afflicted by semantic ambiguity. No true referent existed for it. On the one hand, “the people” was inclusive and denoted an integral body politic. In the abstract, it designated a social totality without remainder. On the other hand, “the people” was radically exclusive, rooted in the maldistribution of political power and material resources. According to this usage, “the people” formed a subset that comprised nothing but remainder; “the people” there signified the destitute, the marginal, the vanquished, the déclassé—in short, “the part that [had] no part.”16 Neither wholly one nor the other, “the people,” instead, figured the dialectical relation between the divergent social bodies for which it stood, between inclusion and exclusion, difference and equivalence, unlimited expansion and expulsion, political abstraction and sociological specificity.17 Where the one was given form by the unity it expressed— “the people” as nation—the other was contingent, unpredictable, fragmented, shapeless, informe. All of which is to say that “the people” was never a thing—positive, definable almost mathematically, a unitary subject—but a provisional object of political discourse and social ideology, of identification rather than identity. Accordingly, “the people” did not make itself seen or heard by direct means; its appearance was always already mediated, always already a matter of form.18 The exception to this rule—indeed, the exception that proved the rule—lay in moments of revolt, deliberate acts of contradiction and negation, moments when, in other words, “the people” defied those who represented it or the representations to which it had hitherto been made to conform. In revolt, “the people” came forward independently on behalf of its own interests; “the people” assembled.19 In so doing, it exposed the insubstantiality of “the people” as a conceptual ideal, producing fissures in an otherwise universalizing language of political and natural rights, les droits de l’homme et du citoyen. In 1830, Michelet misrecognized the object of his admiration. He later wrote of the modern bourgeoisie’s determination to distinguish its position in society as a “class

introduction  ( 5 )

apart”;20 he never had much to say about the conditions of Black slaves in the colonies; he forged La Femme into an archetype, admirable and dependent; eventually, he conceded that “the people,” “mute by itself,” only spoke through an homme de génie.21 In his effort to wrest “the people” away from the ideologists in 1831, Michelet could not, as it were, avoid becoming one himself. His constitutive idea of the nation prefigured kinds of social experience and practice that did not exist in everyday life. A “wish-image,” then: in the July barricades Michelet sought to transcend, not illuminate, the incompleteness of the social order.22 It was an image he held fast until the June Days of 1848 confronted him with a prospect he no longer regarded as his own, one for which he could not write.23 Riven by a cruel violence, Michelet’s “people” emerged from the catastrophe of 1848 wounded and bleeding. History lay in ruins. In the days and weeks after the 1830 revolution, lithographs of the street fighting flowed from the presses. Together, these prints created the barricade’s first imagery. Eh bien oui . . . ! Charbonnier est maître chez lui is typical of the patterns of representation that quickly coalesced.24 There, as nearly everywhere else, the worker embodies “the people.” Like the National Guard and the polytechnicien, he appears in uniform: blouse or chemise blanche with carmagnole, sleeves rolled up to reveal a muscular forearm, collar open to reveal a powerful breast, pants torn at the knee, a casquette or chapeau mou. Sometimes his smock is replaced by castoffs from the local garrison, ragged and piecemeal, but worn with dignity and pride. In general, he stands at center, usually behind the barricade, occasionally on the barricade; in a few instances, he builds a barricade. Whatever the scenario, the barricade, often no more than a small pile of paving stones interspersed with spars of wood, almost never provides him with cover. It operates neither as roadblock nor as entrenchment. The worker does the lion’s share of the fighting, but he never turns swinish, criminal, “dangerous.” He is essentially good; the violence he exercises is tempered by benevolence. Should he be offered a verre, he insists that it be cut (Seulement de l’eau rougie, la petite mère) (fig. 2); he does not steal; he fires pragmatically (Tirez sur les chefs et les chevaux. Jeune gens . . . f . . tez vous du reste) (fig. 3); when his adversaries are defenseless, he protects them from the mob. The words he speaks are crude but quaint, often humorous, a patois which is, nevertheless, not his own (Eh ben, as tu touché Jean Louis? Ah dam j’scais pas . . . ma foi j’ai tiré dans l’tas) (fig. 4). In short, his goals remain modest; he is patient; he fights for a constitution (fig. 5). The thought of overstepping does not occur to him. After the battle he will lay down his weapons and return to the workshop. Only once or twice—in Honoré Daumier’s L’Épicier (fig. 6) and Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet’s L’Allocution (fig. 7)—do his intentions seem uncertain. The small heap of paving stones, in these instances, becomes a solid wall, stretching top to bottom and cutting the picture in two; behind it, the

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Fig. 2  Hippolyte Bellangé, Seulement de l’eau rougie, la petite mère (29 Juillet 1830), 1830. Lithograph, 20.9 × 16.6 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

Fig. 3  Auguste Raffet, Tirez sur les chefs et les chevaux. Jeune gens . . . f . . tez vous du reste (28 Juillet 1830), 1830. Lithograph, 19.4 × 30.9 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

Fig. 4  Hippolyte Bellangé, Eh ben, as tu touché Jean Louis? Ah dam j’scais pas . . . ma foi j’ai tiré dans l’tas (28 Juillet 1830), 1830. Lithograph, 21.2 × 17.1 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

Fig. 5  Hippolyte Bellangé, est de deux! . . . . . . . vive la charte (28 Juillet 1830), 1830. Lithograph, 21.5 × 16.8 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

insurgé readies his next move. The graffito on Charlet’s wall reads: “A good place to die for the Nation.” Almost as a rule, painters took their lead from the imprimeries, repeating or adapting the forms of the lithographers whose prints had been circulating in the streets of Paris for months. Nearly fifty paintings of the July barricades were shown at the Salon of 1831. The new king, Louis-Philippe I, had given instructions that any submission dealing with the revolution be accepted; he wished to have the two—the barricade and the so-called July Monarchy—appear indivisible. For the most part the jury complied.25 Two small paintings by Philippe-Auguste Jeanron, an unknown at the time, were nevertheless rejected; neither of them has survived. We are told that the first, 1830, depicted a worker wounded on a barricade, and that the second, 1831, showed the same man dying in his garret, “not on account of his wounds,” Victor Schoelcher adds, “but on account of his dreadful poverty.”26 Not only had Jeanron violated the terms of the official mythology; he had reimagined the trait d’héroïsme as tragedy. Together, the two paintings revealed the revolution’s limits and discrepancies. Therefore, they had to go. The future, if it was to be figured at all, needed to look something more like Jeanron’s third entry, Les Petits Patriotes (fig. 8), whose smoking, pensive rascals, decked out in ( 8 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 6  Honoré Daumier, L’Épicier qui n’était pas bête . . . (DR 7), 1830. Lithograph, 20.4 × 17.1 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

Fig. 7  Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, L’Allocution (28 juillet 1830), 1830. Lithograph, 25.6 × 32.9 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

Fig. 8  Philippe-Auguste Jeanron, Les Petits Patriotes, 1831. Oil on canvas, 100 × 80 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Daniel Arnaudet).

a gendarme’s bicorne and a lancer’s shako, “playing with a charming gravity at being soldiers in July,” seemed at ease with their “modest historical dimensions.”27 After all, one of them is tuckered out. Critics found Jeanron’s masquerading enfants delightful. They did not detect in the image of youth a question about who the future was for. The barricade they saw had the appearance of a lookout, its chef, standing straight, peering beyond the picture rather than into it—rather, that is, than at the wreckage and death that come even with victory. He is a sentinelle on “the day after the battle.”28 Of all the barricade pictures exhibited in 1831, none proved more momentous, none more admired or more reviled, than Eugène Delacroix’s Le 28 juillet 1830: La Liberté guidant le peuple (fig. 9). A large, imposing work—Delacroix famously imagined that the canvas, at 260 by 325 centimeters, could serve as just compensation for his absence from the street fighting—La Liberté guidant le peuple invested the July Days with world-historical importance, on par with the Revolution of 1789 and the Greek Wars of Independence.29 No one mistook the painting for charming. No one called it modest or delightful. No one found it assuring.30 Nevertheless, several critics did see something of Jeanron’s Petits Patriotes in Delacroix’s grande machine. Partly the resemblance was technical; neither painting put the world in (perspectival) order. But the critics who raised the issue—Gustave Planche, Barthélémy Hauréau, Schoelcher, all of them friends and allies, all of them favorably disposed—were largely unconcerned with faulty drawing. What mattered, for them, was the way Jeanron and Delacroix brought the revolution up close and how the disproportion of fore- and middle ground—the enfants and the cleaning crew, the crowd around Liberty and the one behind—heightened the effect.31 Everywhere else, the revolution, fitted to the format of a battle scene, happened at a distance. Either that, or it moved, virtually, into the picture (figs. 10–11). In defiance of the norm, Jeanron has one of his petits patriotes stare us down. He angles the wooden spar of the barricade such that it appears to transgress the picture plane, its near edge, moreover, red with blood. Our distance from this barricade is measured by the width of a single paving stone. Should we attempt to enter the picture, moving past the wooden spar and the stagelike barricade it supports, we quickly run up against the sharpened corner of a massive building, a solid block of stone unbroken by doors or windows. Les Petits Patriotes works hard to keep us to one side. It does not want us to inhabit a world that has fallen. Delacroix activates the illusion of proximity his painting shares with Jeanron’s. He directs the charge Liberty leads toward us and crops his picture at top, left, and right, as if to let us know how much time we have to get out of the way. He then fills the painting’s shallow foreground with corpses: a worker, nearly entirely naked except for his chemise and a single blue sock; a National Guard, his uniform splayed open, one boot missing; a cuirassier, his body severed by the painting’s right edge. We are made introduction  ( 11 )

Fig. 9  Eugène Delacroix, Le 28 juillet 1830: La Liberté guidant le peuple, 1831. Oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Michel Urtado). Fig. 10  Joseph Beaume and Charles Mozin, Attaque de l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris, le 28 juillet 1830, 1831. Oil on canvas, 145 × 210 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Gérard Blot). Fig. 11  Hippolyte Lecomte, Combat de la rue de Rohan, 1831. Oil on canvas, 43 × 60 cm. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris.

Fig. 12  Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse, 1819. Oil on canvas, 491 × 716 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Michel Urtado).

to peer into the hollow, black depth of the cuirassier’s shako, whose nearness is matched only by lifeless hands and feet. La Liberté guidant le peuple takes Théodore Géricault’s Radeau de la Méduse (fig. 12) and rotates it 180 degrees, the latter’s raft now transfigured in the barricade, the sénégalais crowning its far end transformed into Marianne, the surging, wall-like wave that threatens to capsize Géricault’s makeshift vessel vaporized and diffused, the smoke of gunfire at the moment of victory.32 Shapeless and expanding, this nimbus bred of civil war advances with the crowd, grows thicker with the crowd, its density intensified rather than alleviated by the distant—too distant!—view of the city. If we can make out the towers of Notre-Dame, dappled with blue, white, and red, it is so that we can put this scene in context. When the tricolor was displayed from their heights on the twenty-eighth, everyone knew who had won. History drives on in La Liberté guidant le peuple, as it does in Les Petits Patriotes, not toward some fictive horizon deep in the picture space but one located somewhere in our space, somewhere behind us or to our left. The shift in direction has a profound effect: it reorients the relation between the revolution and the sense of time its image captures. The two paintings figure the limits of picturing; they put us in contact with the revolution. We ( 14 )  the revolution takes for m

share its ground. The difference between the two works is that Jeanron’s painting stays still. That is its modesty. Like nearly every other painter—in this regard, Jeanron remains exceptional— Delacroix drew freely from the lithographers, reprising forms and iconographies that, by 1831, had already codified the revolution’s image: the same low-lying barricade constructed with paving stones and spars of wood, the same dramatis personae—workers in chemise or blouse, gamins and polytechniciens and National Guards, a young bourgeois, probably a student, in haut-de-forme and redingote. Only now “the people” faces out. The polytechnicien falls back into the crowd, a mere head and bicorne among the pack; the National Guard lies dead across the foreground, a different kind of raw material for the barricade; the gamin brandishes two pistols. The countenance “the people” thus presented—more travailleur than homme du people—was not one the bourgeois of 1831 wished to look at.33 The Journal des artistes had one worker speak the offense to another: “I’d really like to know why there are only gamins in Liberty, two or three workers, and an odd amphibian who has an appearance I can’t make sense of at all. Was this rabble, as they say, all that was there during these famous days?” “Tell me, where’d the artist find these lowlifes,” his companion responds. “Who said we were all as ugly as Cossacks? You’d really have to be steaming mad to go looking for them when so many fine folks were in the crowds.” Smeared with mud, even one’s semblable starts to resemble a savage; top hats, too, become canaille should the environment dictate. Real impropriety, however, belonged to the half-naked, working-class woman in whom this “people” saw itself (fig. 13). The exchange continues: Say . . . funny thing about the painting: the virago holding the flag, doesn’t she have only one leg? How convenient for climbing barricades! And her bosom, it’s entirely naked and filthy! How obscene! You know the fulsome Louise, whom we rolled to the Stock Exchange on a cannon . . . she was turned all the way around and even then didn’t have the gall to strip down to her waist. They say she’s an allegorical figure. Allegory explains little. Take the dead man rotting at the foot of the barricade. I’d like to know who was despicable enough to take his pants and his sock, and to make a cravat out of his shirt. Is he allegorical too?34 The dialogue is satire; written en poissard, it is meant to split “the people” in two. Its bias and tendentiousness are explicit. Yet as satire, the dialogue points toward a distinctive quality of Delacroix’s painting. The problem for Delacroix’s detractors is not that Liberty disobeys the conventions of allegorical personification; it is how she disobeys. introduction  ( 15 )

Fig. 13  Eugène Delacroix, detail of La Liberté guidant le peuple (fig. 9). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Michel Urtado).

She presents the necessary signs of abstraction: female nudity, stolid face in profile, a bonnet rouge, arm and hand raised and clutching a tricolor. And yet these signs, which distance Liberty’s body, appear inseparable from their opposites: exposed breasts that are “concrete and sensual,” a dress made of “rough proletarian cloth,” a “businesslike musket,” passages of darkened pigment that easily read as dirt or hair, a tricolor that is not whole.35 Delacroix’s Liberty is shot through with competing signifiers—a missing leg, class, nakedness, time—and these discrepancies render her non-self-identical, a refractory combination of political ideal and female flesh. She is one and the other, “allegory appearing in one place, on one particular day.”36 Thus, she is neither. And once the metaphor falters, once the pure referent blackens with gunpowder and sex and death, the conditionality of this referent becomes irrepressible. A pantless, sockless corpse rotting in the street might be allegory, too; a chemise might tidy up into a cravate. ( 16 )  the revolution takes for m



“Is this an ode? Or is it satire?” Schoelcher inquired. Is it Pindar celebrating Hieron’s triumph? Or is it Horace reproaching Paris for his cowardice? The blood which flows abundantly, the cracked skulls, the figures soiled with dirt and blood, these mature old men who defile the minds of children, and this improvised hero who deposes with dull eyes, sunken cheeks, and blue lips, having spent her life in the cabaret, drunk and hideously debauched—is this a satire of combat, mocking the victory and the price it cost? Or are we to believe in the joyful and celestial expression of this allegorical figure, this vigorous and young Liberty who dominates the entire composition, who soars over this scene of murder and misery like an angel with wings outstretched? If I must speak my piece, at the risk of error and foolish conjecture, I’ll say that I see in the painting incontestable traces of both of these opposed sentiments: ode and satire, enthusiasm and contempt, admiration and disgust, aspiration toward a better future and, at the same time, a bitter and grievous recollection of the past!37

Schoelcher is right: La Liberté guidant le peuple does not settle into a single system of representation. “The people” in front moves one way; “the people” behind moves another. La Liberté guidant le peuple crosses frames of reference. It is ode and it is satire. Neither genre holds sway nor sublates the other. For Schoelcher, ode and satire—allegory and history, “the people” as nation and “the people” as mob—appear in Delacroix’s painting as antinomies, opposing “sentiments” with distinctive temporalities. Odes illuminate the future, he says, and satires the past. A “dialectical error” therefore organizes the painting, Schoelcher concludes, and Delacroix’s allegory, a “living type,” “an odd amphibian,” embodies the resulting paradox.38 Yet it is not Liberty who, in the end, faces out from this deadlocked present. Her “joyful and celestial expression” looks right. In Delacroix’s image of the barricade, it is the canaille that miraculously emerges from the depths. When the Salon closed on September 8, the minister of the interior, Casimir Périer, purchased La Liberté guidant le peuple and, despite the painting’s ambiguities, had it put on display in the Musée royal.39 By 1832, however, the painting was locked away in storage. I suspect the revolt of Lyons’s canuts in November, a four-day battle triggered by the refusal of manufacturers to regulate the price of silk and hence stabilize wages, informed the decision.40 The special status of La Liberté guidant le peuple had nevertheless already been sealed: “the birth of an idea,” Théophile Thoré later said of the picture, “[was] likewise the birth of a generation.”41 For the next two decades (indeed, up until our present day), one could not imagine the revolution or address the revolution’s promises and betrayals without recalling Delacroix’s painting.42 Even in absence, introduction  ( 17 )

La Liberté guidant le peuple shaped the meaning of revolution in the nineteenth century. The persistence with which Delacroix’s painting did so—as an object of emulation, as foil, as limitation—is what the following chapters go on to describe.

Postscriptum In the spring of 1848, after the February Revolution toppled the July Monarchy, Jeanron, whom the Provisional Government appointed directeur général des Musées nationaux, pulled La Liberté guidant le peuple out of the shadows. Once again Delacroix’s painting could be aligned with the myth of revolution. Once again, its ambiguities proved inconvenient. By June, the Second Republic had splintered, and the “popular masses,” newly christened “the industrial proletariat,” (re)formed as a “class apart”—“a nation within the nation.”43 They pled: Le pain ou la mort! Thousands fought to the death that summer, after which La Liberté guidant le peuple disappeared. Worker and bourgeois marched off in different directions. No more did they appear as two halves of “the people” dreaming of wholeness.44

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•1 Trivial and Terrible Reality Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. —Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 1940

I

n Honoré Daumier’s Dieu mène la France (fig. 14), a lithograph published in Le Charivari on September 16, 1834, Delacroix’s Liberty reappears as the nation itself. The mural crown she wears confirms the transmutation; so too does her classical drapery. Here, she is simple allegory, unadulterated. Bound at the wrists, France gets spirited away by Louis-Philippe, whose noteworthy characteristics had, by then, been reduced to a set of repeatable metonyms: frock coat, top hat, muttonchops, and morbid obesity. Only a pear is missing, or a head or body resembling one. These are the signs on the basis of which Louis-Philippe’s public image, his image as “bourgeois” king, was established. There is nothing godly about him. Turned away, Louis-Philippe drags his captive over a barricade that stretches laterally across the picture left to right; they proceed toward an undefined space. France begins to despair, or so her tilted head and downcast eyes seem to suggest, when she discovers the corpse at her feet, a rebel worker whose stiff body is at once opposed to the rounded paving stones amid which he lies and yet inseparable from them. There are no National Guards or polytechniciens or gamins in sight. These are the lithograph’s basic terms. Lined up, they impart bitter news: victory in 1830 was finally a defeat. The lithograph, in this respect, is uncomplicated. But it is also unusual. Daumier has drawn Dieu mène la France with a lithographic pen; in general, he used crayons. The result is an image whose contours, hatching, and empty, unmarked spaces emerge as its distinctive features. That is, the image lacks mass; it lacks depth. It is all lines. One could easily mistake Dieu mène la France for a wood engraving, for wood engravings, too, hinge on the work of negative spaces, of absences and removal. The leanness of the

Fig. 14  Honoré Daumier, Dieu mène la France (DR 206). Lithograph, 20.8 × 26.7 cm. Le Charivari, September 16, 1834. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

image, in turn, tells us something about the kind of sovereignty Daumier’s Louis-Philippe envisions. Embodiment does not appear to be part of it. Louis-Philippe is not a king who declares, “l’état, c’est moi.” Instead, the state is external to the body of the king; it belongs to him. Or rather, he has conquered it, which is little different from saying that he stole it. And now, he leads it. Consequently, power and possession become conjoined. Divine right devolves to bourgeois right. The caption, Dieu mène la France, is a quotation. It comes from a speech François Guizot, then minister of education, delivered before the Chamber of Deputies on March 11, 1834. That day, the deputies were debating a new law on associations, which had been introduced to the legislative assembly after a weeklong work stoppage in February brought twenty-five thousand looms in and around Lyons to a halt. The republican deputies, remaining defiant, accused Guizot of hypocrisy. Guizot had been an active participant in the Société aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera, and its former president: ( 20 )  the revolution takes for m

“If I may, gentlemen, let me remind you of something Bossuet once said: ‘Man vexes himself, but God leads him.’ Let the [republican] parties be vexed, let them exercise the liberty our institutions guarantee them. But do not lose faith in our cause, which, with sound reason and courage, you have supported over the last four years. For it is this way that God leads France.”1 The implications of Guizot’s defense were enormous. For here, Louis Blanc later noted, the Chamber of Deputies, in a cynical effort to restrict the sovereignty of “the people,” was willing to abrogate a right without which civil society, much less representative government, could not exist.2 The bill, which banned associations of twenty people or more, passed by nearly one hundred votes.3 It was followed by an authorization law aimed at colporteurs (so-called mouthpieces of the secret societies among the working classes) and an extension of the stamp tax, which regulated the production, distribution, and circulation of published matter, to caricature. Any print produced in multiple would henceforth be required to bear the government’s red, embossed revenue stamp on its face. Infractions, the deputies decided, would be tried by correctional tribunals instead of local juries. The gap between those who govern and those who are governed had widened. In 1834, formal law granted the July Monarchy arbitrary powers. In its first years, Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy preserved its connection to the revolution of 1830 and embraced its achievements. Sustaining the image of political reconciliation and social harmony—of “progress” and popular sanction—was necessary. The July Monarchy’s claim to legitimacy, and modernity, depended on its maintenance. Any acknowledgment of the regime’s historical origins, however, demonstrated just how ineffective this claim was and how readily it could be discredited. Instability was therefore endemic; the new form of governance was founded on contradiction. At this stage, the vital question for the July Monarchy was how controls might be placed—in other words, how the “turning point” marked by 1830 might be realized and defused all at once.4 A shadow dance, then. The July Monarchy pinned a tricolor cockade to its top hat. It considered umbrellas and frock coats signs of citizenship. It tolerated caricaturists and satirists (article 7 of the revised charter stipulated that censorship could never be reestablished). In 1831, Louis-Philippe commissioned a monument—a triumphal column—to be raised in memory of those who had perished during the Three Glorious Days. The site of the former Bastille was selected for the column’s eventual location. Commemorative programs of this kind, which affirmed the link between 1789 and 1830, were especially advantageous. The repetitions they enacted, by proclaiming the revolution complete, produced the revolutionary event as history—that is, as a past that could be neither retrieved nor repaired. Small wonder, then, that the July Monarchy blanched when, in July 1833, it learned the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du trivial and terrible realit y  ( 21 )

Citoyen, a prominent neo-Jacobin association that had emerged in the wake of the June Days of 1832, was planning to turn the third anniversary of the revolution into an occasion to relive it.5 The Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen threatened to perform citizenship by putting it into practice. At this point, the ideological bases of juste milieu became untenable. In December 1833, the government indicted twenty-seven members of the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen for plotting the insurrection. The Procès des Vingt-Sept, as the trial was known, began on December 11 and dragged out over eleven days. True though the government’s allegation might have been, the scarcity of incriminating evidence—July 27, 28, and 29 had all passed without major incident—made it difficult for the prosecution to substantiate the charges. Having to build a case around a potential event—indeed, a nonevent—proved no deterrent, however. Thanks to recent revisions in the Penal Code, conspiring to overthrow the government was itself a punishable crime; whether anything came of the conspiracy was inconsequential. The jury remained unpersuaded. On its own, the Penal Code provided insufficient reason to convict. The trial ended in fiasco. By the twenty-second, all but one of the defendants, Jean-Jacques Vignerte, had been acquitted.6 Three months later the Chamber of Deputies ratified the Law on Associations. The reconciliation myth propagated by the July Monarchy in the early 1830s was never especially convincing. It didn’t have to be. By assimilating 1830 as an object of history, this myth transformed commemoration into its opposite. Consequently, the memory of 1830 ceased to provide a reliable basis on which counter-images might be generated, might be made to speak back to the administered image, putting its worldview in doubt. These were adventitious effects: they rendered the affirmative image of 1830 unusable, even meaningless, for the July Monarchy’s enemies on the Left. Few artists confronted the predicament as directly and persistently as Daumier. Dieu mène la France was one response to the dilemma and marked its terminus. Un héros de juillet, Mai 1831 (fig. 15) was another. Daumier drew Un héros de juillet in the spring of 1831; for reasons unknown, however, Charles Philipon, Daumier’s publisher, withheld the lithograph until December 15, 1832, when he printed it, in reduced size, as part of a review of “the best political caricatures that have appeared since the July revolution.”7 This date was (and is) significant, maybe fortuitous, certainly not accidental: on that day, one year earlier, Philipon hung Gargantua (fig. 16), Daumier’s ferocious indictment of the monarchy’s exploitation of national wealth—that is, for a fat king’s way of appropriating the fruits of labor and crapping them out as paper rewards and honors—in the vitrine of La Maison Aubert. Both Philipon and Daumier served time because of it. The result of their incarceration was a new daily, Le Charivari, in which Un héros de juillet eventually appeared. Yet the two lithographs are linked by ( 22 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 15  Honoré Daumier, Un héros de juillet, Mai 1831 (DR 23). Lithograph, 21.8 × 18.9 cm. Deposited June 1, 1831. The Daumier Register, Noack Collection. Photo © www‌.daumier‌.org.

Fig. 16  Honoré Daumier, Gargantua (DR 34), 1831. Lithograph, 21.4 × 30.5 cm. The Armand Hammer Daumier and Contemporaries Collection, Gift of Dr. Armand Hammer. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo © Hammer Museum.

more than just chronology. The one, like the other, turns on the transformation of things into images. They prefigure the devolution consummated in 1834. In Un héros de juillet, a veteran of the 1830 revolution, disabled in the course of battle, stands on the balustrade of the Pont de la Concorde. It is ten months after the great event. A pavé—this man’s “final resource,” the lithograph tells us—hangs around his neck like an anchor stone; the allusion to the barricade is plain. For now, with the man’s cane tucked up under his right arm, it ensures balance. Perched one-footed as if on a pedestal, Daumier’s hero recalls the statues that top triumphal columns. Only his back has been turned to us; the acts of heroism he embodies look away from us. He peers down. This July hero shares little, as it were, with the gilded Génie de la Liberté that Louis-Philippe eventually selected for his Colonne de Juillet. Across the Seine, this ( 24 )  the revolution takes for m

hero’s sole refuge from immiseration—his reward, his médaille de la Légion d’honneur— the Chamber of Deputies flies a tricolor flag, the very same symbol to which he pledged his every possession, including his body. All that remains to him now are the pawnshop tickets with which he has patched together his frock coat, an emblem of bourgeois subjectivity now threadbare and piecemeal, no longer capable of concealing its substance or use. A testament to this man’s ongoing deprivation—he appears, in effect, to have collected the countless pawns not to take stock of what he has relinquished but to employ them—these receipts hold out no greater promise of redemption than the Chamber of Deputies across the river. The comic effect of Daumier’s lithograph has much to do, in the end, with the identity it establishes between the Chamber of Deputies and the Mont de Piété, both of which issue “the people” of 1830 paper receipts—constitutions here, pawns there— in exchange for its sacrifices, both of which count on “the people” not to reappear. It strikes me, all the same, that Daumier’s lithograph would be half of what it is if this identification did not turn on signs of dividedness and difference: the broken body of the anonymous invalide (he is a “hero” denied recognition, an everyman alienated from self and society alike); the balustrade that cuts, horizontally and flatly, across the picture plane, foregrounding its function as partition and barrier (this Pont de la Concorde separates rather than unifies); the Seine we do not see and the middle ground it fails to clarify, fails to deliver as a pictorial site of conjuncture and hence fictive distance; the inevitable seams ensured by the combination of shoddy stitchwork and impractical materials; the partly legible inscription on each pawnshop ticket indicating the object hocked; the sole of a bandaged, soiled foot and the eternal whiteness of a classical façade, the one against the other, the one carefully drawn and slowly built up, foreshortened, and modeled, the other marked out by a few lines; the paving stone and the tricolor flag, the one a fragment, the other a unity, the one a means, the other an end; the triumph of the past (Un héros de juillet) and the indignity of the present (Mai 1831); the conversion of use value into exchange value. These signs of dividedness and difference constitute a radically different kind of commemoration. Here, commemoration turns on deterioration, disenchantment, and resignation. It appears distrustful of representation and representation’s claims to fullness, of its own function and purpose. It cannot escape the negative, nor can it resist the pull of pessimism. After all, the héros de juillet needs his paper coat. Without it he is not fit to be seen. It seems clear to me, however, that pessimism was not what Daumier sought after, that he hoped to redeem commemoration rather than invert the forms of commemoration then available. What good, I can imagine him wondering, would it do to turn this man around, clean him up, heal his body, give him a worker’s smock and a bonnet rouge, place the paving stone in a powerful and confident hand—in other words, make this héros truly heroic, put him back in the revolution, pretend that the revolution was trivial and terrible realit y  ( 25 )

indeed his, even his for the taking? Daumier knew this other image well. He would use it often in the following years. But it would not do in 1831. I suppose he did not know precisely what would. Still, he lends this alternative the firmness and solidity of his best drawing. He brings it into view. Yet he struggled, it seems, to discover positive and enduring meaning in the result, as if he sensed he could not expunge the lithograph’s negativity without compromising what it makes visible, as if, in other words, he could not decide whether negativity was its limit or its truth. The drawing had to remain as it was, an ode to a forgotten héros and an image of suicide. Irresolution is the burden it bears. Unsure as Daumier might have been about the form commemoration needed to take in 1831, he knew what was at stake. He knew that to redress history he had not just to transpose its key but to take it out of key, render it flat and depleted, unpoetic. The goal, ultimately, was to see history matter-of-factly, to depict it matter-of-factly—that is, to see and depict it in its partiality. Remembrance might then work against history; it might undo history’s seamless continuity. This is the critical difference between a picture like Daumier’s Un héros de juillet and Jeanron’s 1830 and 1831. Unlike Jeanron’s pendants, Un héros de juillet enters into a deadlock with its constitutive substance. The matter it takes up determines its concrete activity. The lithograph cannot rescue its hero. Like him, it must make do with paper, its thinness, the provisional hold it has on those parts of the world it makes active and signifiable. Pawnshop stubs and patchwork frock coat, a nineteen-by-twenty-two-centimeter sheet of low-weight stock—paper is the positive and negative of Un héros de juillet, its measure of quality and its conversion into quantity. It is ground and figure, the space of appearance and its mediation. That is, paper binds. It unifies. But the unity reconstituted—and this is what makes the lithograph so trenchant, so apt—appears in an emblematic state, in which its historically negated character and meaning become perceptible. In April 1834, political tensions boiled over. The first barricades appeared in Lyons on April 9. Five days later, Paris followed suit. Rebels held neither front for very long. By the time barricades went up in Paris on the thirteenth, Lyons had already fallen. The rebels in Paris fared even worse; they managed less than a day. The street fighting was over by the morning of the fourteenth. Arrests in both cities were abundant (Le National put the initial number between 2,110 and 2,160).8 Casualties, especially in Lyons, were high. Combined, the death toll for both cities totaled approximately 550 insurgents.9 Planned by the comité central of the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (hereafter SDHC) and led by SDHC sections in Paris and Lyons, the uprising in April 1834 demonstrated a political self-consciousness and coherence that set it apart from previous insurrections. It had none of the spontaneity of 1832 and little of the social volatility of 1831. The goal in 1834 was simple: liquidate the monarchy. When the ( 26 )  the revolution takes for m

Chamber of Deputies convened on March 11 to debate the Law on Associations, its members had had every reason to fear conspiratorial plots and the secret societies’ ability to pull them off; they had had every reason, as they did, to prepare. The Law on Associations, which provoked the uprising, put the army, National Guard, and police on standby. Nearly forty thousand men, mostly regular troops, mobilized when the tocsin sounded.10 Adolphe Thiers, who was then minister of the interior, made sure the government’s advantage would hold: in the days leading up to the thirteenth, the day Paris was set to take up the torch, he issued arrest warrants for all known leaders of the SDHC in the capital. The strategy cut straight to the rebellion’s weakness. The alliances the SDHC had formed with workers outside its ranks were uncertain; the arrest warrants, which put the SDHC leadership on the run, guaranteed that they would remain so. On the thirteenth, “the people” of Paris by and large chose to stay home. The insurrection accelerated the retour à l’ordre already in motion. Once calm had been restored, Louis-Philippe’s ministers appropriated funds to raise and equip a regular army entrusted with internal security; in the same session, they imposed severe penalties on anyone caught in possession of war-quality firearms.11 Alarmed by the ever-present specter of political unrest—never mind the mounting campaign to expand the franchise beyond the propertied classes—the electorate (roughly 0.5 percent of the population) returned the favor in June, stripping nearly every republican deputy of his seat in the Chamber of Deputies.12 If any question remained as to how the July Monarchy planned to proceed from there—that is, how it viewed the struggle and those who fought it out—the following principle, proclaimed in August by a commission charged with granting indemnities, made the regime’s intentions clear: “The government does not want the triumph of the social order to cost any tears or regrets. It knows that time, which gradually dispels the grief occasioned by the costliest personal losses, is powerless to redress the losses of fortune.”13 Then as now, “broken windows” counted for more than broken bodies.14 A year later, and after Giuseppe Fieschi attempted to assassinate the king on July 28, 1835, the July Monarchy completed its about-face by passing the so-called September Laws. These ironhanded measures permitted the procureur général to prosecute defendants in their absence; they empowered the president of the Cour d’assises to remove defendants from a courtroom should they be seen to inhibit “the free course of justice” (both of these provisions codified actions taken when the April insurgents refused to cooperate during the Procès d’avril);15 they reduced the percentage of jury votes required for criminal convictions from two-thirds to a simple majority, and they reintroduced prior censorship for published materials. The last of these measures had the most immediate impact. Incitement to insurrection and hatred of the king were reclassified as crimes against the state. Demanding changes of dynasty, invoking the Bourbons, calling for a republic, attacking property rights, and impugning the Charter were all forbidden. The security deposit, or caution money, trivial and terrible realit y  ( 27 )

required of newspapers and caricature journals to offset fines and court fees was increased by as much as fourfold. Alphonse de Lamartine likened the “September Laws” to a “reign of terror against ideas.”16 The triumph of 1834–35 proved decisive. There would not be another barricade event until February 1848. The inordinate violence exercised in quelling the insurrection nevertheless ensured that the defeated would leave a mark. On April 14, shortly after five o’clock, voltigeurs from the Thirty-Fifth Regiment invaded the Parisian tenement at 12, rue Transnonain and, upon entry, murdered fourteen unarmed men, women, and children. Accounts differed as to what, if anything, provoked the invasion. According to the soldiers of the Thirty-Fifth, snipers had fired on them from the tenement’s top floor as they were clearing away the remains of a barricade. In other words, they were following orders. By that evening, however, the street fighting had long since ended. “We are peaceable people here,” one of the victims, Charles Breffort père, aged fifty-eight, audibly pleaded.17 His assailant stabbed him three times with a bayonet. The search for weapons turned up five muskets. One of them was unusable; the others had not been discharged.18 A new form of life appeared on the fourteenth. It was not to be shared. Social bonds, the bonds of relationality, had broken.19 Word and deed had parted ways. And because they had, because violence had replaced communication, the massacre and the indifference with which it was carried out exposed the vulnerability of the power in whose name it was perpetrated. That night, violence and power, as Hannah Arendt has said of the two in general, were opposites.20 It was for this reason, I suspect, that “Rue Transnonain” developed into one of the century’s most enduring—and dangerous— symbolic forms, impervious even to Haussmann’s demolitions. The April insurrection broke out three weeks before the Salon closed. The full extent to which the disorder of events affected the Salon is, however, difficult to assess. Of the Salon critics still publishing reviews, only one—H. H. H. of the royalist La Quotidienne—addressed the insurrection directly. “Today,” his opening paragraph concludes, “the wretched drama has come to an end. The sound of cannon and rifles has ceased to be heard everywhere. Lyons counts its ruins, Paris its massacres, order reigns in France. We shall now resume our work for those who wish to escape the terrible upheaval that has left so many noble hearts so deeply troubled.”21 The formula unfolds as one might expect: now that the interruption of worldly affairs has come to an end, let’s return to art. There is, nevertheless, something peculiar and distinctive about this critic’s language. “Lyons counts its ruins, Paris its massacres, order reigns in France”: the timbre of the sequence, and direction of its address, pivots on the final component.

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Doubtless meant to summon the cynical declaration with which Horace Sébastiani, as minister of foreign affairs, welcomed the brutal subjugation of Polish insurgents by Russian Cossacks in 1831—“Order reigns in Warsaw”—the expression had been used before, after demonstrators touting the Polish cause in Paris and striking silk-workers in Lyons had been subdued with comparable force. By 1834, moreover, the remark had been turned on itself, processed into fodder for satirists and sloganeers who recycled it as shorthand for the July Monarchy’s self-denial (figs. 17–18).22 “Order reigns in France” ought to be taken ironically, then—not for its callous disregard but for its falsehood, because the July Monarchy, this critic intimates, had bought into its own mythology. It is not by accident that he proceeds from there to review Victor Schnetz’s Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, le 28 juillet 1830 (fig. 19) and Horace Vernet’s L’Arrivée du duc d’Orléans au Palais-Royal, dans la soirée du 30 juillet 1830 (fig. 20), both of which he derides as government buyouts, naked propaganda, and delusional attempts, yet again, to reconcile order and disorder. The primary object of his contempt, in other words, is the Orléanist monarchy, whose hedged bets guaranteed its own demise. Take, for example, the way his description of the crowd in Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville quickly becomes a portent of things to come: “The entire foreground is cluttered with workers and sublime gamins whom the ascending powers praised for every vile thing they had done and whom today, under circumstances no different, they call craven assassins.” Or the following excerpt from his account of L’Arrivée du duc d’Orléans au Palais-Royal: This here . . . it’s Paris, it’s the street on July 30, it’s the people who fought and who, for those few days, believed they were something or called themselves something. But see that man on the right of the picture who cries out and doffs his hat; this man is one of those who did not fight, who emerges from his cellar only at this moment and who, though for now small, fearful, and trembling, is soon going to grow and tower over those braver than he. . . . Look to the left—there’s another man, a tricolor cockade attached to his top hat, surrounded by men who serve as his escort and steer his course through a small side door to the Palais-Royal, thus quickly removing him from the street. This other man, ill-at-ease and furtive, is Louis-Philippe, whom King Charles X appointed lieutenant general of the kingdom, guardian of Henri V. . . . This man, finally, is Louis-Philippe, turning his back to frank and honest expressions of opinion and sliding unnoticed into his citadel, from which he will soon denounce the muzzled victors. And now you know why the fearful man doffs his hat; you know why the man from the cellars cries out so strongly— it’s because he has recognized his king, and in this fearful, obsequious man you can make out the nascent juste milieu.

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Fig. 17  J.-J. Grandville, L’Ordre règne à Varsovie, 1831. Lithograph, 28.6 × 19.8 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

Fig. 18  J.-J. Grandville, L’Ordre publique règne aussi à Paris, 1831. Lithograph, 28.3 × 18.2 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

Drop the invocation of Charles X and Henri V and these words might just as well have been written from the other side of the political spectrum. Of course, we cannot, nor should we, overemphasize potential compatibilities. The point this critic is trying to make—about middling politics and about middling art, about how middling politics produces middling art and about how middling art expresses middling politics—turns on their presence. So long as the revolution continues to be a touchstone, the equation states, political and artistic life will never transcend the disarray from which their current form derives. April 1834 and Horace Vernet represent for him the same inevitability; they are woven into the very fabric of juste milieu. Another Legitimist critic, Paulin Lim, put it more straightforwardly: “Some maintain that art has progressed and is flourishing. Art will remain in shambles until France has said to the revolution, as God said to the sea: ‘You shall go no farther.’ France will say it soon.”23 Republicans offered a modified diagnosis and, predictably, a different course of remediation. “The only truth”—this is the historian Barthélémy Hauréau—“that can still unite men amid

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Fig. 19  Victor Schnetz, Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, le 28 juillet 1830, 1833–34. Oil on canvas, 458 × 500 cm. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

the chaos of negations—the republic—is proscribed: the monarchy does not permit the inspiration of liberty to enter its museums.”24 With L’Arrivée du duc d’Orléans au Palais-Royal and Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, the image the July Monarchy had constructed for itself—indeed, the affirmative image of 1830 tout court—had become an anachronism. Charles Farcy, writing about Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville, cuts straight to the chase: “This important work is fresh proof that paintings of circumstance, those which recount contemporary political events, trivial and terrible realit y  ( 31 )

Fig. 20  Horace Vernet, L’Arrivée du duc d’Orléans au Palais-Royal, dans la soirée du 30 juillet 1830, 1834. Oil on canvas, 121 × 87 cm. Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Gérard Blot).

especially when these events are linked to civil wars, have little chance of achieving lasting success. In the immediate aftermath, when enthusiasm for the triumphant cause runs high, they appear marvelous. But minds cool after a few months, and just as one does not wish to see civil war perpetuated in real life, one cares not to see it perpetuated in painting.”25 Farcy was right, and the government knew it. Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville was a commission from another time. Assigned to Schnetz in December 1830, the painting was supposed to have been finished, ready to be hung alongside three others in the Hôtel de Ville’s Salle du Trône, by the first anniversary of the July Days.26 Commissioned sometime in 1832 (the exact date is unknown), L’Arrivée du duc

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d’Orléans au Palais-Royal was no more timely.27 “Let these works be the last of their kind,” implored Gustave Planche.28 Evidently unconcerned with the picture’s critical failure, Louis-Philippe had a copy of L’Arrivée du duc d’Orléans au Palais-Royal made for Versailles before having it hung in his private gallery at the Palais-Royal.29 Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville never made it to its projected destination. The public life of both paintings concluded with the Salon. These were regrettable pictures, belated expressions of a politics in decline. Nearly every critic agreed. But the two paintings fell short for different reasons. Criticism of Vernet’s picture centered on two basic points: its historical (in)accuracy and its artless propagandism. How the picture was painted mattered to few. If critics did address issues of form or style, they generally did so to denigrate Vernet as a facile painter driven by opportunism and a shameless desire to appease whoever might be footing the bill. Gabriel Laviron’s assessment is broadly indicative: As a work of art, M. Horace Vernet’s painting doesn’t warrant serious critique. One can’t tell if it’s daytime or night, nor how the figures are illuminated, nor how they got there, nor what they’re doing. This isn’t Paris on the night of July 30. M. Vernet probably wasn’t in Paris, or if he was, his memories have served him badly. By morning’s end the barricades were gone and the streets were being repaved. . . . To conceal this blunder, M. Vernet has put the hydra of anarchy in the middle of the street, which he has represented with two or three eternal enemies of order who, looking down, roll their eyes like Francisque in his fine roles at the Ambigu-Comique. For contrast, he has painted on the other side of the canvas a respectable bourgeois of the neighborhood who enthusiastically removes his hat and holds it dutifully in his hand, as if to say: Well, well, well, there’s our brave, propertied man having returned from the countryside! That there’s the head of a landlord who has no fear of revolutions! You won’t find anything dafter and more confused than M. Vernet’s bourgeois. In brief, the painting is hopeless as a work of art, false as history, and misbegotten as a courtier’s flattery.30 Make the necessary changes—call the picture “nature, truth, history,” describe the workers reading a proclamation around a barricade as having “a physiognomy worthy of the famous heroes of the Auberge des Adrets,” say something about “the voting rights of the bourgeoisie”—and the other side of the debate, argued only in the pages of unabashed Orléanist organs like Le Courrier française and Le Moniteur universel, comes into focus.31 Laviron’s hunch was correct: Vernet, then director of the French Academy

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in Rome, had not been in Paris on the night in question and had worked, exclusively, from documents Louis-Philippe had had sent to him.32 L’Arrivée du duc d’Orléans au Palais-Royal was history twice removed. Critics by and large concurred that Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville deserved no greater praise than L’Arrivée du duc d’Orléans au Palais-Royal, and that it, even more than its wayward companion, stank of factitiousness. Even so, they were kinder to Schnetz. Most considered him a different breed of artist from Vernet, less the by-product of his age—less a manufacturer of things—than a well-intentioned painter of Italian peasants who, in accepting a commission for which he was ill-suited, betrayed his talents. “What kind of jealous friend,” remarked Planche, “could have encouraged his brush to recount the Prise de l’Hôtel-de-Ville en 1830? A personal and bitter enemy couldn’t have given him more perfidious advice.”33 “To Rome! M. Schnetz, to Rome!” exhorted Charles Lenormant. “All of Paris implores you: Return to Rome!”34 The ineptitude of Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville was forgivable, then, owing in large part to the programmatic demands of a commission the painter could shoulder only with discomfort. Critics had a harder time excusing the painting’s derivative composition. The openness with which Schnetz modeled Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville on La Liberté guidant le peuple did him no favors.35 For despite itself, Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville is everything La Liberté guidant le peuple is not: clean, balanced, static, masculine, rational, located, episodic, prosaic, total, resolved; its figures, in unbroken unison, charge into the pictured space, toward the Hôtel de Ville and away from the viewer. They are tightly drawn, proportional, and properly scaled; they pose no challenge to the frame that encloses them, to the genre that defines them, or to the social stereotypes that classify them, control them, bring them into focus, and make them legible. In a word, Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville completes La Liberté guidant le peuple, fleshes out its fragments, releases the pressure of its cropped edges and absent foreground, and gives it polish—fini. Against the memory of La Liberté guidant le peuple, Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville looked cumbersome and heavy-handed, its version of July 28, 1830, overly controlled and safe. Critics came down especially hard on Schnetz’s image of the crowd and the student—Liberty’s male replacement—who spurs it on. To them, the crowd appeared wooden, even indifferent; it lacked élan. The student, like the crowd as a whole, seemed unmoved, oddly impassive and aloof, but also decidedly unfit to lead the charge: devoid of aplomb, too affected, too delicate, too charmant. “Dressed up as he is,” observed Fabien Pillet, “and gesturing as he does, this elegant young man looks too much like a stage-actor.”36 Pillet demanded a primus inter pares with unimpeachable motives, a determined and selfless leader of men. All he saw was a “theatrical elevation,” a jeune homme whose individuation, in turn, spoke only to private interests. Not that Pillet hoped to see another Liberty on this barricade, or rather, Liberty’s male equivalent; the homme de tête he imagined would be poetic because indisputably historical, ( 34 )  the revolution takes for m

because, as such, he would truly represent the crowd above which he has been raised. Nominated by those he leads, the jeune homme would, in short, be legitimate. There was no need for Pillet to elaborate; he was simply reinscribing official mythologies and accepted histories. What compelled Pillet to issue his corrective, however, was not the unorthodox history Schnetz’s student seemed to embody. True or false, that history fell flat. It was, rather, the artificiality of this jeune homme that put Pillet on edge. He distrusted the acclaim Schnetz granted the jeune homme, considered it dangerous because it valorized a performance the picture failed to recognize as such: “I regret that the spectator sees him as the revolution’s hero and, as if he were an illustrious general, attributes to him the better part of a glory that belongs to an insurrection held in common.” The danger, for Pillet, was how this jeune homme recast the history of 1830 as représentation and therefore risked exposing its denouement as unnatural. Pillet was selling an ideology that had passed its expiration date, one even the July Monarchy seemed by then to have been eager to let rot. The questions had to be changed; history had to move on. I think Pillet was right, nevertheless, to make a point of the painting’s theatricality. In front of Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville we do indeed become spectateurs watching as the momentous in history gets played out before us. The painting distances itself from its viewers; its barricade, both stage and scrim, concretizes our difference. I think Pillet was right, as well, to see the spectacle as a threat. The question, however, is whether that threat still had purchase in 1834, whether, that is, the spectacularization of 1830—its refashioning as stage drama, its hypostatization as représentation—was, at the time, really all that undesirable. I doubt it was. At least I am unconvinced, as some art historians have suggested, that the July Monarchy came to fear Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville for its potential to incite unrest.37 True, the July Monarchy chose not to have the painting installed in the Hôtel de Ville; in the end, it scrapped the whole program, which was devised to affirm the continuity not only between the July Monarchy and the July Revolution but also between 1830 and 1789. The notion that 1830 had both extended and completed 1789 had proven unsustainable. History as denial replaced history as mythification. Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville would be the last major work to address the barricades of 1830. The July Monarchy needed a new concept of history and thus of itself. It needed new images. It needed to make passivity acceptable.38 Seen from this angle, the almost universal choice of Schnetz’s critics to use the word froideur to describe the overall tonality of Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville comes to seem not just apposite but incisive. Combat de l’Hôtel-de-Ville signaled its own inconsequentiality, its own dispensability. Over the deplorable massacres in the rue Transnonain, Daumier showed himself to be a truly great artist; the print has become rather rare, for it was trivial and terrible realit y  ( 35 )

confiscated and destroyed. It is not precisely caricature—it is history, trivial and terrible reality. In a poor, mean room, the traditional room of the proletarian, with shoddy, essential furniture, the corpse of a worker, naked but for his chemise and cotton nightcap, lies on his back at full length, his legs and arms outstretched. There has without doubt been a great struggle and tumult in the room, for the chairs are overturned, as are the night table and chamber pot. Under the weight of his corpse—between his back and the floorboards— the father crushes the corpse of his little child. In this cold attic there is only silence and death.39 This is Charles Baudelaire describing Daumier’s Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834 (fig. 21) in 1857. Compare this passage from “Quelques caricaturistes français” with the sales pitch Philipon published in La Caricature on October 2, 1834, shortly after La Maison Aubert dispatched impressions of Rue Transnonain to subscribers of L’Association mensuelle lithographique: This lithograph is horrible to behold, as horrible as the dreadful event it recounts. It shows a murdered old man, a dead woman, the corpse of a terribly wounded man lying upon the body of a poor little infant whose head is split open. It is not a caricature, it is not a charge. It is a bloody chapter in the history of our modern era, here sketched by a powerful hand and inspired by a noble indignation. In this drawing Daumier has risen to great heights; he has created a tableau that, although painted in black on a sheet of paper, will prove no less valuable, no less durable. The butchery of rue Transnonain will remain an indelible stain on those who permitted it, and the drawing I have discussed here will be the medal struck to preserve the memory of a victory over fourteen old men, women, and children.40 I would not be surprised if Baudelaire had composed his assessment of Rue Transnonain with Philipon’s explication in front of him; surely he had read it and appreciated its terms. The similarities between the two descriptions are unmistakable—too unmistakable, I am tempted to say, to be written off as coincidence. I cannot help but think that Baudelaire wanted to make a point of the repetition, as if that repetition, for him, could mean something specific, as if it could give heightened definition to what he saw in Rue Transnonain that led him, like Philipon, to consider it more history than caricature. Neither Baudelaire nor Philipon would have stressed the distinction if it were solely—even primarily—a matter of genre and the greater purchase of one, the “noble genre,” on the historical; few at the time understood as well as they that

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Fig. 21  Honoré Daumier, Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834 (DR 135). Lithograph, 28.6 × 44.1 cm. L’Association mensuelle lithographique, October 1834. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1920. Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

modernity might best be handled with a lithographic crayon. “It’s not precisely caricature,” Baudelaire says.41 If nobility remained an indispensable part of the equation for Philipon, indignation provided its measure. For Philipon, the very substance of history itself was at stake; he wanted to ensure that the stains did not come out in the wash. Baudelaire seems to have agreed, at least partly. For him, however, the barbaric and the ordinary in history could not so easily be prized apart or plotted along a vertical axis of value. Rue Transnonain is “history” for Baudelaire because the form Daumier gives it—its suffering, its enormity, its conversion of misery into necessity—embodies both simultaneously. Meaningfulness in the conventional sense provides no insurance against oblivion in Rue Transnonain. Its image turns on coldness, silence, and death. The inflection Baudelaire gives Philipon’s explication recalls another document from the period, one that, in its refusal to dissociate meaningfulness and ordinariness, may very well be considered the verbal pendant to Daumier’s lithograph: Alexandre Ledru-Rollin’s wildly popular pamphlet Mémoire sur les évenements de la rue Transnonain, dans les journées des 13 et 14 avril 1834.42 Consisting almost exclusively of interviews Ledru-Rollin conducted with survivors of the massacre, the pamphlet not only recasts history but gives it an entirely new voice, a voice both idiosyncratic and collective, spectacular and everyday; it is the voice of ordinary people recorded in their own words, below their names and ages and genders and occupations. Ledru-Rollin, a lawyer by trade, envisioned a new kind of memoriality and historicity: he proposed to realize the events of April 13 and 14, often in graphic detail, by admitting “the people” into the world of speakers. Yet what makes Ledru-Rollin’s version of the vox populi instructive—what gives it a distinctive authority—is its odd repetitiveness, the way each account, unique in itself, confirms the others by repeating them. No one testimonial takes precedence over any other; no one is exceptional. They are, each of them, one among many, all of which, together, constitute a mémoire. Philipon had excerpts from the Mémoire printed in the August 4 issue of Le Charivari, introducing it as an irrefutable repudiation of “the official report” (les mots royals).43 For Philipon, the Mémoire and the event were identical. Daumier did not share Ledru-Rollin’s confidence. Nor did Daumier assume he could, or should, fade into the background. It is not the spectacle of the massacre— sensational, sensationalizable—that Daumier has us see but the atonality of its aftermath, the body count. He does not give names to the slaughtered; he does not claim to give a voice to suffering; he does not permit the experience to be assimilated. Instead, he foregrounds the ineffable and senseless, the negligible—an anonymous working-class family gunned down while going through the paces of its nightly routine. The result appears grotesque, obscene, even abject: the splayed legs of a worker, indecorously exposed as the friction of his inert body sliding against rough floorboarding pulls the

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blood-stained nightshirt that once covered them in another direction; the head of this man, awkwardly propped forward—chin to sternum—by a disheveled bed, his features neither ugly nor distinguished, yet rendered gaunt by poverty, the bullet hole in his temple barely visible by comparison; the foreshortened body of a woman lying stiffly on her back, seen from below and headless; the balding pate of an old man, his features avian and emaciated, his body severed at the breast; an infant, face down in a pool of blood, crushed beneath the weight of his father’s corpse as it slumps from bed to floor, the only intimation that his small body might still be intact registered in his father’s distended torso; the entryway to a toilette still open because, only moments before, still in use; a naked pillow; the soles of bare feet. There is nothing sentimental, nothing sensationalist or rhetorical about the way Daumier figures these deaths. Rue Transnonain grieves the massacred but offers no signs of redemption, that their bodies might be anything greater or more meaningful than themselves. Why should they have to be? The caption—Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834—says all that needs to be said: a street and a date, the site of massacre on the following day.44 These are the facts, flatly stated; they do not break the silence of death; they do not distinguish between the terrible and the trivial, the momentous and the senseless, the great and the small; they do not elevate. But neither do they objectify. Rue Transnonain is not, as some have said, a still life;45 it is not fit for consumption. Like the image as a whole, the caption is not so much short on words as it is painfully precise. Rue Transnonain is an unforgiving image. It is all dead weight, earthbound. Everything in it occurs at or below bed level, on the floor, and in relation to the barren corner at lower left—barren, that is, except for Daumier’s prominent initials. Even the shaft of light that rakes across the picture appears subject to its gravitational force. Notice how the line it cuts across the floor turns the angle of light against itself—the refraction has no apparent material source—and redirects it, along with everything in its path, downward and to the left. It is as if the shaft of light were barring its own route, as if it too had substance and mass. The light bears down on the worker, threatens to bleach him out just as it enforces the woman’s tenebrous obscurity. Daumier’s drawing appears no less encumbered or substantial; its lines are definite, hard-edged, and largely unbroken, its modeling confident and conflicted by turns. White and black negate form even as they affirm it, prohibit vision even as they make it possible. Most of Daumier’s lithographs from the early 1830s evince a similar commitment to the sculptural qualities of form—its masses, its volumes, its densities—and the tactility of things, a sensibility, as it were, to weightedness, to the way matter not only has weight but also bears weight. Still, the heaviness of Daumier’s hand in Rue Transnonain seems to me exceptionally salient, almost too palpable, almost brutal. It is relieved neither by the abstractions of the symbolic nor the artificiality of the

trivial and terrible realit y  ( 39 )

physiognomic. It, too, aligns meaningfulness with presentness, but simply to confirm its own deadpan matter-of-factness. To put it another way, we are not meant to decode Rue Transnonain. It conceals nothing. Nor are we meant to read it. Or rather, we are not meant to read Rue Transnonain if by reading we hope to activate it, to alleviate it, to loosen the blood-splattered floorboards that anchor it, to give it the temporality of the living. Rue Transnonain shows us a world irreversibly turned sideways, defined by the shared relationship of its people and its things to the simple ground across which they have been laid out. We cannot reappraise these people or those things; we cannot see above their low-lying horizontality or stand them upright. The picture’s frame, format, and point of view, as well as its orienting axis—an oblique diagonal from lower left to upper right whose slope runs more than it rises—disallow it. For Daumier, it seems, the ground alone could secure the ordinary against disaster; it alone was certain, positive. In Rue Transnonain, dignity and uprightness are not correlatives. Rue Transnonain therefore presents a challenge to description. The difficulty has little to do with the lithograph’s lurid content yet everything to do with its matter-of-factness. Rue Transnonain asserts itself as representation—Daumier’s initials proclaim as much—but disables metaphor. Philipon and Baudelaire surely struggled with the paradox: Philipon responded with uncharacteristic reticence,46 and Baudelaire recalled an overturned chamber pot. To see and describe as representation but also against representation: this, then, is the difficulty. For Rue Transnonain reveals the way things are—the way things appear—by leaving them practically unchanged. Instead, it stages a unity of opposites: the terrible and the trivial, the routine and the catastrophic, power and violence, a symbolic system, expertly formed, that short-circuits its own machinery. Rue Transnonain makes one and the other visible, part of the same world. This is what I take matter-of-factness ultimately to mean; it has only partly to do with accuracy or facts. One does not judge the truth or falsity of Rue Transnonain by measuring it against some reality external to the work itself. Rue Transnonain does not reproduce history; it discovers history. When Philipon printed his explication on October 2, he must have known that most of the impressions of Rue Transnonain, sent out only days earlier, would never reach their destination. He had been dodging the stamp tax for months, receiving in turn one menacing letter after another from the tax bureau. In July, the fisc issued a final warning: future noncompliance would result in legal action. At the time, Rue Transnonain was being fitted out for publication. Philipon had little choice but to suspend production. At no point, however, did he consider heeding the fisc’s warning. Conceding would have been bad for business: high-quality caricatures disfigured by a “hideous ( 40 )  the revolution takes for m

seal,” decimated profits.47 Instead, he wrote his explication, in which he described Rue Transnonain as a struggle against impermanence. Private and public interests—history and the business of caricature—here converged for Philipon. Upon its release in August, Rue Transnonain remained unstamped. The government had known about Rue Transnonain since July, when an early proof of Daumier’s lithograph appeared in the vitrine of La Maison Aubert. For the time being, however, its hands were tied. The Penal Code, even in its revised form, upheld the ban on prior censorship codified by the Charter of 1830. In July no laws as yet had been broken. The press had first to be set in motion; duplicates had to be made. Rue Transnonain had to exist in multiple before infractions could be named. Despite the delay, the July Monarchy’s efforts to contain Rue Transnonain largely succeeded. Gendarmes seized nearly every impression as soon as it entered circulation. Afterward, they confiscated the lithographic stone and destroyed it.

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•2 This Is Not a Program The whole is the untrue. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1951

D

aumier likely saw Auguste Préault’s Tuerie (fig. 22) before setting to work on Rue Transnonain. Préault’s bas-relief, then in plaster, had been hanging in the Louvre since the Salon of 1834 opened on March 1. Daumier might also have seen the sculpture in Préault’s studio. The two had been close since the 1820s, when they met at the Académie Suisse, and were known to show their works to one another before exhibiting them publicly.1 A lithograph of Préault’s Parias, a figural group also from 1834, adorned the otherwise bare walls of Daumier’s apartment-studio.2 The printmaker and the sculptor learned from each other and would continue to do so. They shared commitments, desiderata. Together with Jeanron, another comrade from the Académie Suisse, they formed the Société libre des Beaux-Arts shortly after the barricades of 1830 came down. The purpose of this association was to reorganize the administration of and education in the arts. La Liberté, the title given to the journal launched by the Société libre des Beaux-Arts in 1832, had to belong to art as much as politics. Yet on this occasion—what ought massacre look like in 1834?—Daumier disagreed with Préault. At least he adopted a differing view of the matter after April 14. Daumier appears to have thought, nevertheless, that Préault got the basic question right. He agreed that massacre—its form and its violence, the effect of its depiction—hinged on the structural relation between figure and ground. The trouble was, in Tuerie, that half of this relation—ground—had gone missing. Préault submitted five sculptures in 1834: Tuerie, Parias, and three medallions of Roman emperors. Only Tuerie was accepted. Few found the rejections surprising. The

Fig. 22  Auguste Préault, Tuerie ( fragment épisodique d’un grand bas-relief ), 1834/1851. Plaster/bronze, 109 × 140 cm. Collection du musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres. Photo © Ville de Chartres, musée des Beaux-Arts.

academicians who sat on the Salon juries had never made a secret of their disdain for the “new school” or its intransigent demands for creative independence, and Préault’s works, for many, revealed the true enormity of the dangers to come. One critic, the Saint-Simonian philosopher Jean Reynaud, characterized the central figure in Mendicité, a large-scale relief Préault exhibited at the Salon of 1833 (his first), as an “Ugolin prolétaire.”3 There was little indication that the animosity was abating. Quite the contrary. In 1834, the jury took a hard line against any sculptor working under the banner of Romanticism: neither Jehan Duseigneur nor Antonin Moine, and not even Antoine Bayre, a favorite of the duc d’Orléans, succeeded in having his works shown. Tuerie was going to stand alone. The argument for Tuerie’s acceptance, we have been told, came from the sculptor Jean-Pierre Cortot, a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts and, at the time, a proponent of an austere form of classicism. Needless to say, he was an unlikely advocate. Cortot’s reasoning was pragmatic: if admitted to the halls of the Louvre, he ventured, Tuerie, a sculpture whose achievements were inseparable from its transgressions, would issue a clear warning about the “disorder of the new school” and the “frenzy of rebellion” it brought to a fever pitch. The security of traditional culture, Cortot figured, could do with the negative example, and Tuerie had all the right stuff to strike fear into the minds of young sculptors and public alike. The rest of the jury consented. They would stage a public execution and exhibit Tuerie “like a criminal hanging from the gibbet.”4 Tuerie was an obvious choice for the purpose. Of Préault’s four rejected works (never mind those of his peers and comrades), none matched its brazen disregard for every rule, every standard that the jury—and the Institut—held sacred.5 Even Préault’s supporters saw in the relief and its technical bravado a sculptor carried away by impetuosity (fougue). In their eyes, however, Préault’s missteps were forgivable, even appreciable, for they considered his fanatisme, whatever its errant ways, an enviable strength, a sign more than others of his creative autonomy, of his “originality” and “individuality.”6 To friends, Préault realized the liberties fought for, and partially won, during the revolution of 1830. He made “republican art.”7 To enemies, he was an insurrectionist.8 Tuerie permitted equations like these, equations linking aesthetics and politics, to be made with ease—and it was this quality of his work, I presume, that rendered the relief particularly deserving of humiliation. Never had sculpture so joyously danced on the grave of its masters. Cortot’s gambit did not exactly pay off. Tuerie, it is true, elicited its fair share of vitriolic criticism, sometimes expressed as derisive dismissal, sometimes as hysterical denunciation, sometimes as silence. But neither the mass defection nor the counterinsurgency Cortot anticipated seems to have materialized. Much, I imagine, to Cortot’s chagrin, Tuerie drew rather than repelled crowds of Salon-goers who, the critics noted, ( 44 )  the revolution takes for m

viewed the spectacle with astonishment instead of grim satisfaction.9 In other words, Tuerie was seen for the exception it was supposed to be. Emboldened by the jury’s lack of cunning, Préault’s allies doubled down: these “base maneuvers” evidenced more conclusively than ever before the “blatant illegality” of a system of judgment modeled on the conclave.10 Cortot expected Tuerie to extend and reconsolidate the Institut’s rule; he expected it to express that institution’s power. Instead, Préault’s relief demonstrated how precarious this rule was and the violent lengths to which the Institut’s appointed guardians were willing to go to secure its future. The clarity of Cortot’s warning cut both ways. All things considered, the jury in 1834 wasn’t wrong. Tuerie is an unruly sculpture, aggressively so. Measuring 109 by 140 centimeters, it disobeys on a monumental scale; it declares its rebellion public and total. At its core, however, Tuerie remains a work in pieces. The subtitle Préault gave it, fragment épisodique d’un grand bas-relief, is apposite in this regard. At first blush, one may think otherwise. Tuerie is nothing if not compact; nothing if not full. Nearly every inch of its sprawling surface swells with one body part or another, each of a different relative size, each in incompatible proportion. Still, these parts touch. Space has collapsed. Tuerie’s figures belong to different spatial planes, and yet they vie, or so it seems, to inhabit the same singular space. Or do they? The more Tuerie’s figures come into view, the more they seem to want to flee (some left, some right).11 It is as if coming into view posed a threat no less harrowing, no less violent than its alternative. To be a part of Tuerie’s fullness means putting the integrity of one’s body at risk. The relief ’s frame, an enclosure delimited by the edges of bodies and enveloping swaths of hair—that is, by the boundaries and extensions of the body— consequently takes on an ambivalent aspect: it enforces one unity, a unity both organic and arbitrary, while prohibiting another. The relief and its bodies cannot be whole at the same time. Tuerie’s is therefore no unity in the ordinary sense. A unity of the disparate, it defies totalization. Disintegration is intrinsic to it.12 More than one critic, dismayed by Tuerie’s antinomies, likened the relief ’s maelstrom of writhing, disproportionate, and partial bodies to a madman’s dream. “Arch-fantastic” and grotesque, cried some; savage, barbaric, imprévu, bemoaned others.13 Sympathetic critics drew from a comparable set of terms, but for them, estimable names like Dante and Charles Maturin—references, no doubt, meant to pull Tuerie into familiar space and to put it in contact with current aesthetic tendencies— came more genially to the tongue. The language of irrationalism on which Préault’s detractors leaned was similarly contrived. The boundaries of normative culture had to be reinforced; transgressions had to be punished, had to be declared alien. The same vocabulary could (and did) serve competing ideological interests. The nightmare, the agony of interminable torment, the Melmothian pact: all three nevertheless have a certain accuracy about them. They get the timbre of Tuerie right. this is not a program  ( 45 )

Tuerie is a horror show; it makes a horror show out of sculpture. Tuerie’s insistence, however, that sculpture attend to actions and states of being outside of its traditional domain—to pain, suffering, and violence—scandalized only the most conservative and reactionary among Préault’s critics. Violence per se was not Tuerie’s offense. What flummoxed Préault’s critics was the indeterminacy of that violence. Who here is killing whom? Everyone struggled (and usually failed) to place the relief ’s dramatis personae. “Jeune homme,” “jeune fille,” “forte femme,” “nègre”: Tuerie’s principal figures were indefinite types, generalities. They could not be made into persons or characters. The skeletal figure emerging (or maybe withdrawing) between the “nègre” and the “forte femme” (one or two critics, looking to the child she carries, described her as “mère”) was no more than “une tête coiffée d’un casque.”14 Years later Théophile Silvestre called him “a kind of chevalier.”15 No one ventured a guess as to where the affray occurs, or when, or why. The violence Tuerie depicts bore no (proper) name; it belonged to no known narrative. No discernible reason or cause or purpose could be attributed to it. This tuerie could not be deemed necessary, and from that vantage, it appeared senseless, a crush of broken bodies reeling in an agony that defied first principles. Tuerie’s fragments in turn became refractory; they were signs of suffering without meaning. Long ago Luc Benoist distilled Tuerie’s diverse achievements down to one: the pressure the relief exerts on its material bases, the way it pushes them—plaster and bronze, on the one hand, relief sculpture as a structurally and institutionally determined medium, on the other—to the limits of what was then considered possible: “[Préault] wanted to produce a large-scale sculpture. But since material conditions imposed an impassable limitation, he could only realize a fragment. He managed nevertheless to put this intrinsic limitation in service of the colossal. . . . [T]his unique work, even for Préault, is a masterpiece . . . on account of its lacunae.”16 Benoist’s conclusion seems to me the closest we have to a dialectical assessment of Tuerie. It suggests how, for Préault, materiality could be both limitation and possibility, how the one could be mediated by the other while negating it. The result is chaotic, to be sure: a relief that, in refusing to subordinate form to coherent effects, verges on incomprehensibility. The more the work asserts itself, in other words, the more it eludes us; it appears full of unfillable holes. The lacunae matter, then, but not as mere absences to the relief ’s explosive presence, not as mere unintelligibility. Over the years, art historians have either ignored or deflected this quality of Préault’s work. They have sought, conversely, to domesticate the relief and its iconographic and formal instabilities. They have rifled through the source materials dear to the French Romantics looking for thematic clues, concocting in turn strange brews and literary admixtures—a little Hugo here, a touch of Shakespeare there, perhaps some Walter Scott, Auguste Barbier, Dante, or even the New Testament.17 They have mined the ( 46 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 23  Caravaggio, The Kiss of Judas, ca. 1602. Oil on canvas, 133.5 × 169.5 cm. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Photo © National Gallery of Ireland.

history of art in search of formal precedents—Caravaggio’s Kiss of Judas (fig. 23), we have been told, anticipates the compositional relationship between the central female and the chevalier to her left, Anne-Louis Girodet’s Ossian (fig. 24) the matrix of têtes d’expression.18 In the most compelling of these arguments, Jonathan Ribner demonstrates how Préault likely conceived Tuerie as a “pessimistic revision” of Henri de Triqueti’s two reliefs for the Palais Bourbon, La Loi protectrice and La Loi vengeresse (1833–34).19 By and large, the goal of art historians has been to give “specificity to the [relief ’s] generalized fougue.”20 I understand the impulse. Source hunting yields few concrete rewards, however, for nothing in Tuerie sits still long enough for such interpretive gestures to gain steady traction. Not that we should disregard the clues Tuerie does offer up; they provide a basis, however fragile, on which meanings can be established. But neither can we pretend that these clues stabilize the relief, or that the coherence they hint at is anything but provisional and episodic. If we do, we see definiteness where we know it is not; we work against the sculpture itself. To be clear: I have little doubt that the iconographic and formal allusions to which art historians have pointed are indeed part of Tuerie’s conception. There is no denying, for instance, that Préault had a literary turn of mind or that he espoused a distinctly “Romantic” fascination with violence and suffering. He occupied a regular seat at this is not a program  ( 47 )

Fig. 24  Anne-Louis Girodet, Les Ombres des héros français reçues par Ossian dans l’Elysée, 1802. Oil on canvas, 192 × 184 cm. Musée national des Châteaux de Malmaison et Bois-Préau, Rueil. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Franck Raux).

Théophile Gautier’s petit cénacle and was a militant follower of Hugo. During the bataille d’Hernani, a formative event for the generation of 1830, he assailed the ossified ranks of the rear guard with caustic rejoinders: “À la guillotine, les genoux!”21 It makes perfect sense, in other words, that he would draw inspiration for his chevalier from Hugo’s Hernani, or that the “nègre” at upper left would come from a viewing of Othello (Alfred de Vigny’s Le More de Venise débuted at the Comédie-Française on October 24, 1829). We know, as well, that he was an avid reader of Barbier’s Iambes, which provided Préault’s generation with ready-made imagery—mythic, shared, ( 48 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 25  Antoine-Jean Gros, La Bataille d’Eylau, 1808. Oil on canvas, 521 × 748 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Franck Raux).

damning—around which it could rally; any one of the Iambes can be made into a source. Nor is there denying that Préault often looked to his forebears for help. A fleeting glance at Girodet’s preparatory drawings for his Ossian makes plain that Préault had likely seen them, even if we cannot be sure of the extent of his engagement with them (or, for that matter, the final painting). We would probably want to insert Antoine-Jean Gros here, too, whose Bataille d’Eylau (fig. 25) would have shown Préault how to configure a tangled mass of bodies for whom killing means staying alive. First-generation Davidians were never the targets of Préault’s enmity; they were not “knees”—all reflex, all obeisance. Even more than Gros and La Bataille d’Eylau, however, we would have to add the dense, crisscrossing network of half-dead, partial bodies—some white, others Black, some French, others étrangers, all of them touching—in Géricault’s Radeau de la Méduse (fig. 26).22 We would have to dispense with Napoléon’s confidence. The references are there. There are probably more of them if we would look hard and long and creatively enough. (I have said nothing yet, for example, of Delacroix and La Liberté guidant le peuple, or La Mort de Sardanapale.) That, I suppose, is the point: they, not it, are there. Individually, no one of these references can explain the relief, nor can they do so in sum. They do not form an aggregate whole. Tuerie is not simply eclectic. Each reference, on the contrary, sits incongruously (thematically as well as this is not a program  ( 49 )

Fig. 26  Théodore Géricault, detail of Le Radeau de la Méduse (fig. 12). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Michel Urtado).

temporally) next to the other: a Moorish general known for his rash act of jealousy next to Don Ruy Gomez de Silva, “a Homeric old man as imagined by the Middle Ages,”23 next to Barbier’s or Delacroix’s Liberty who supports both an Innocent and a dying Christ, all of them cast adrift in L’Enfer. Tuerie assembles frames of reference; it blocks connotation by multiplying it, thus permitting no single order of signs to hold sway. There is no way to read one reference through another, or even to make sense of their relationship. They are citations ripped out of context and reconfigured; they are citations—fragments juxtaposed and superimposed—without the stabilizing partitions of quotation marks. A mêlée.24 What Préault’s references are is in itself of relatively minor interest. Enumerating them one by one merely confirms that Préault shared the aesthetic preferences of his peers. Indeed, itemizations simplify the relief by reducing it to a question of changing tastes; they circumvent the relief ’s specificity. It is enough that the references are there, that there are many of them, and that no one of them is granted privileged status. They are fragments—partial, provisional, and equal; they accelerate shifts in meaning rather than anchor it. For these references to matter, they must be there together, if held apart; they must be allowed to work both with and against one another. Taken individually, in isolation, they lose their power, or worse, they assume a consistency at odds with the relief itself. The incongruities are vital. Investing Tuerie’s seven figures with one literary value or another brings us no closer to knowing them, nor does seeing them as inversions of one false image or another. ( 50 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 27  Auguste Préault, detail of Tuerie (fig. 22). Photo © Ville de Chartres, musée des Beaux-Arts.

Neither quite stands up as mediation. Tuerie’s lacunae remain lacunae; its violence remains indeterminate; the nature of the struggle in which these men and women are engaged remains groundless. We cannot give this tuerie a history any more than we can place it, truly size up its protagonists and antagonists. The relation of one figure to the next is enigmatic, an obstacle we cannot, with any certainty, overcome. Each of them is partial, even singular; each maintains its difference. Together they constitute a multitude rather than a people. Take, for instance, the Black figure at upper left (fig. 27). To Préault’s critics, who referred to him simply as “le nègre,” he signaled the savage and wanton aggression of the racial Other. In 1834, a Black man with furrowed brow and clenched teeth, his coarse hair and beard grasped by the hands of some other (white) body, could signify in no other way.25 Nowhere did critics think to locate him in anything other than the available language of colonial subjugation and slavery. After all, on this basis the Black man could, for them, bring the relief ’s violence into sharper focus. Shakespeare remained this is not a program  ( 51 )

unseeable. Albert Boime, who otherwise extols Tuerie, isolates the Black figure as Préault’s principal failure—evidence, he says, of Préault’s socialized racial blindness— and as an indication of the relief ’s critical limitations.26 Préault’s reproduction of racial codes and what they reveal about his inability to see forms of oppression outside of those with which he could identify is indeed disappointing, dispiriting. He shared this failure with the liberals and socialists who, also in 1834, established the Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage. For these abolitionists, slavery was best understood as a political question only contingently tied to race.27 Limitations of this kind, however damaging they are, nevertheless disclose only so much in this case; they tell us hardly anything about the role the Black man actually plays in Tuerie, much less his relation, say, to the chevalier on his right, whose medievalizing helmet, deathly countenance, and modish moustache, although declarative and even specifiable, make the knight no more comprehensible than his neighbor. The chevalier’s impassivity, which the obscurity of his sunken eyes renders all the more inscrutable, and the inconsistency of his iconographical makeup place him not just somewhere else and in some other time but nowhere in particular, in no one time. He is the face of death, out of time and out of place. Maybe I should have said non-relation, then, or even antagonism. Then there is the woman at center, a giant who presses a small child against her breast (fig. 28). Her gesture appears both protective and nurturing, her hand firm yet forgiving, the space between her raised chin and her shoulder a perfect match for the child’s cocked head—a mother’s shelter from the storm. This listless child, twisted such that head and torso face different directions, is the closest Tuerie gives us to a full body: he (or is it she?) is almost complete, almost certainly dead. Presumably our heroine, the child’s mother (some have likened her to Medea, others to François Rude’s Victory) is nevertheless the most generalized and abstract figure in the relief—harder featured than her swooning counterpart, less sensual, more sculptural, a sharp-edged profile planted on a powerful and impossibly elongated neck. She roars some sort of battle cry, but it is tight-lipped, oddly free of affect; it has a breathless, even permanent quality to it, which is relieved only by the wild flow of her hair and the oblique angle of her neck; it lacks direction if not dynamism, or at least it lacks the clear determination of the man behind her, who cries out like her but who, in spite of the hand stiffly braced against his neck, charges toward the relief ’s right edge. Even if death is inevitable for this man, he can choose where and how it comes to him. Finally, the man at lower right, who, bare breasted, collapses under his own weight (fig. 29): he is both the companion and antithesis of the woman at center. If she is marmoreal, he is all flesh, pliant and susceptible and beautiful. His are the only wounds we see, evidence that weapons (the chevalier’s?) are somewhere at play. Like the thumb (her thumb?) that pushes up against his supple breast, these wounds indicate his vulnerability as human—he falls victim both to technological and natural forces, weaponry and gravity; at the same time, their ( 52 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 28  Auguste Préault, detail of Tuerie (fig. 22). Photo © Ville de Chartres, musée des Beaux-Arts.

Fig. 29  Auguste Préault, detail of Tuerie (fig. 22). Photo © Ville de Chartres, musée des Beaux-Arts.

coarse tactility reminds us that he is, without question, sculpture. Nearly in the round, he has, moreover, a ponderousness the other figures do not. What makes this man most sculptural, then, is also what makes him most human. We might do well to search for some relation between him and the Black figure, his Other in both space and kind, yet a man nonetheless human—nonetheless of a human world—for the way his body loses control of its own expressivity. Where the Black man is gnarled and roughly hewn, however, the man at lower right, his wounds excepted, is graceful and polished. In the one instance sculpture describes form. In the other it is subsumed by form.28 A strange balance therefore subsists in Tuerie, but it is precarious, always on the verge of losing control. Only the tendrils of hair that weave in and out of the relief ’s figures appear to hold it in place. Indeed, hair assumes an unusually active role in Tuerie; it is binding and liquid, motile and yet the relief ’s narrow hope for stability. Tuerie is composed, then, but only just so. The composition is fragile, unreliable, even threatening; rather than allay the uncertainties we might have, it amplifies them. Neither perspective nor ground line guides us through Tuerie’s intractable cluster of bodily fragments, and any attempt to match up hands to bodies, heads and faces to bodies and hands—any attempt, that is, to understand how these figures are situated in relation to one another and within the space they occupy—is likely to end in frustration. No mise-en-scène, or logical organization of space, places them, or us. Tuerie’s radically collapsed planes, which exacerbate the precipitous shifts in proportion from one body to the next, and modeling, which intensifies rather than mitigates the contrasts between areas of projection and recessed shadow, render the relief still more difficult to sort out. Space in Tuerie works neither notionally nor phenomenologically; it seems to be of an order entirely its own—damaged, divided, particular to each figure. Simply put, the relief refuses to coalesce around fixed points of orientation. Instead, it foregrounds contradiction. Tuerie is dense but also acute, saturated but also elliptical, emplaced but also displaced. As such, it flies in the face of the period’s most valued frames of reference: restraint and decorum, equilibrium and self-sufficiency, oneness, wholeness, completeness. The title of the relief, which Préault inscribes at an oblique angle above the central figure’s upturned brow, is no more forthcoming. In its most rudimentary sense, “tuerie” connotes an act of killing, yet it designates no particular kind of killing, just the act and the violence it objectifies. Most scholars translate “tuerie” into English as “slaughter.” Peter Fusco has suggested, in addition to “slaughter,” “carnage.”29 Others have opted for “massacre.” These translations have something compelling about them; they evoke the brutality of the relief ’s violence and the degradation it entails with lurid poignancy. All the same, I remain unconvinced that we should, or can, venture any further than “killing,” though killing in Préault’s relief, I recognize, is something that appears to ( 54 )  the revolution takes for m

occur en masse and that produces agonizing, even dehumanizing suffering. Tuerie is indeed a scene of slaughter, carnage its inevitable result. Yet “tuerie,” as a term, strikes me as prosaic, even banal, its affect tied more to the base realities of body-on-body violence than to its possible meanings. The spatial implications of “tuerie” are more suggestive. According to the sixth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, published in 1835, familiar speech used “tuerie” not only as a substitute for “abattoir” but also as a shorthand for those crowds that, when entered, were difficult to escape unharmed—for the killing fields and the riot, we might say. That Préault deliberately omitted a requisite article (“la” or “une”) reinforces the title’s spatial over thematic resonance. Tuerie represents no particular act of killing, historical or otherwise; it proposes no narrative thread that might hold it together or elaborate its content. Nor does it project some indefinite incident of killing, une tuerie. In Préault’s hands, “tuerie” designates a point where act and site of killing coincide. “Killing” is a gerund; it objectifies a progressive verb as a noun. It is neither wholly one nor the other. Tuerie’s nondetermination has been taken by many scholars as an indication of the relief ’s allegorical mode.30 The inference makes sense. The way Préault inscribes tuerie above his female protagonist, a calculated reproduction of the word/image relationship typical of allegorical personification, provides reasonable grounds on which to stake the claim. Yet accounts of Tuerie that look for an immediate relationship between the title and the relief ’s image—or the Fury at its center—all too easily elide the startling incongruity between the placidness of the inscription’s block capitals and the paroxysmal violence it describes, which, if anything, points up the strangeness—even the inadequacy—of the literary device. Théophile Gautier, one of Préault’s most ardent defenders, gets somewhere close to the point: Préault’s Tuerie, a bas-relief whose meaning has appeared obscure to some [quelques personnes], seems to me clear as day [le plus clair du monde]. The idea that presides over the composition is akin to the one that governs Decamps’s great picture of the battle of the Cimbri, which he no doubt titled in these terms to grant it the utmost importance, but which might simply have been called battle, just as Rome is called City—in other words, battle in itself. [Préault’s] combatants, who clash on a strange battlefield, are unidentified; neither the nation nor the epoch to which they belong can be made out. But this is of very minor interest: they could be Parthians or Vandals or Persians or Greeks—I don’t know and I don’t much care. What I do know is that they are men who fight body and soul [du bras et du coeur], with every ounce of their blood and pound of their flesh, who have no other thought or desire than battle.31 this is not a program  ( 55 )

Gautier is surely right to minimize the importance of Tuerie’s whos, whens, and wheres. It is the thing itself—“battle”—that matters. For him, Préault’s figures not only act out this “battle par excellence” but embody it. They become it; they become its torments, its suffering, its agony, its extremity—“it is battle in its final degree of expression and fury.” Still, Gautier’s confidence in the relief ’s clarity stands in sharp contrast with what he says next. He seems unaware of the instability produced by his repetition of the passive verb “s’appeler,” carrying on instead with a description that establishes a positive relationship between Tuerie and “battle” as if the one were equivalent with other: Tuerie is “battle” as Rome is “city.” His assurance of Tuerie’s clarity normalizes the relationship, pulling the relief into a familiar—and traditional—category. And yet “s’appeler” lingers, its repetition doubling back to declare its intention: Tuerie might have been called “battle” as Rome is called “city.” The mood is conditional. My point here is fairly straightforward: if Tuerie is allegorical, it is an allegory that foregrounds the nonidentity between the particularity of its image and the generalizing concept there to frame it—between image and word, execution and objectification. It is, in other words, an allegory aware of the pressure particularity puts on conceptualization— on its simplifications and amplifications—however elusive and abstract the relief appears to be. Should we see Tuerie as the fulfillment of its concept, as Gautier suggests, the end result becomes all the more devastating, all the more extreme, all the more stridently negative: perceived as such, Tuerie is “battle” bereft of meaning. It liquidates the concept itself. At the end of his review, Gautier shifts gears: “This year, and without reason, the jury rejected [Préault’s Parias] . . . a group of outcasts more complete in every respect than anything he has done until now, and with obviously malevolent intent accepted this fragment of low relief whose merit, significant though it may be, is more difficult to comprehend, and can be grasped only by connoisseurs [gens de l’art].”32 His initial declaration of Tuerie’s clarity has to be taken obliquely. “Le plus clair du monde” is a purposeful overstatement, and there is little question as to who “quelques personnes” really were. The assertion was never meant to be criticism; it was an act of defense, Gautier’s way of deflating the equally overblown invectives to which Tuerie and Préault had been subjected by a hostile art establishment. His insistence that clarity be the measure from which to launch a counteroffensive nevertheless seems to me to strike the wrong note. Tuerie is not clear, and Gautier knew it; his closing remarks even suggest that, for him, Tuerie’s value lay in its difficulty. A misdirection, then, Gautier’s opening salvo has the disadvantageous effect of simplifying his more fundamental point about how Tuerie embodies suffering. He fixes Tuerie as a noun. It is battle rather than battle in the making; it is a thing rather than a process. There is an alternative way of reading Gautier’s assertion, one that stays true to his polemical tone but locates it more squarely within contemporary debates. Here the ( 56 )  the revolution takes for m

question pertains less to the transparency of meaning than to the relationship between meaning and means of expression. The architect Bruno Galbaccio put it this way: “In Préault’s work, art develops out of the moral ideas he gathers from his subject. Not only is his bas-relief [Tuerie] full of energy, power, intensity, and animation; it contains characters and passions that are forcefully expressed. The hands of the artist have driven the actors of this drama to swarm beneath the plaster.”33 Préault’s principal achievement, according to Galbaccio, was to invert the conventional relationship between form and content, to have form, and sculptural material, be responsive to content rather than systematically imposing it according to the sterile formulas of accepted practice. For Galbaccio, the inversion bore social significance: it marked a radical break with the Institut’s abstractions and entry “into the reality of life and the innermost [intime] substance of things.”34 For Préault’s detractors, the opposite was true: Préault not only impugned the protocols of academic practice, overthrowing the principle of rule and enthroning the principle of irregularity, but also reveled in the disorder he both produced and extolled. “[The sculptor] burns what he has adored and adores what he has burned” (brûler ce qu’on avait adoré, et d’adorer ce qu’on avait brûlé): this was Charles Farcy’s disdainful, if not inaccurate, way of summing up Préault’s destructive practice.35 Galbaccio would not have disagreed. Unlike Galbaccio (or, for that matter, Farcy), Gautier preferred Parias to Tuerie, and he did so for two entwined reasons. On the one hand, he considered Parias the more accessible sculpture, capable of addressing those outside the narrow ranks of the “gens de l’art” for whom the challenges posed by Tuerie’s formal innovations might have had something meaningful to say. On the other hand, he deemed Parias “more complete in every respect.” Gautier elaborates no further; accessibility and completeness—intimations rather than descriptions—are all he gives us. “In every respect” nevertheless divulges quite enough on its own, for the phrase, in its inclusiveness, preempts questions of finish, the lack of which would not have rubbed Gautier the wrong way but would have sounded alarms among Préault’s adversaries. Wary of overdetermined equations between finish and social responsibility, Gautier needed completeness to retain a critical edge without, however, letting it slide into tired ideological categories. He needed it to be taken almost literally, as a question of integrity, of internal coherence and autonomy rather than manufacture. He wanted the work of art to be reconciled with itself; he wanted it to demonstrate the principle of universal communicability. Parias did. Tuerie—“this fragment of low relief ”—did not. Gautier was right to orient his final assessment of Tuerie around the fragment. In effect, he was simply following Préault’s lead. By describing Tuerie as a fragment épisodique d’un grand bas-relief, Préault begged the question of completeness from the outset. The subtitle appears, however, to have been provocation more than apology. With it Préault only hinted at a larger project, never naming or describing it. Nor did this is not a program  ( 57 )

he propose an architectural context into which Tuerie might be fitted. Even so, Gabriel Laviron distinguished Tuerie among that year’s offerings for being the only bas-relief capable of meeting the structural and social demands of an architectural setting.36 Partial and homeless, Tuerie inhabited a relation it both intimated and denied, it made a point of its relation to the world outside it, and it made this relation, as absence, meaningful. In short, by identifying Tuerie as a fragment, Préault drew attention to the larger work’s perpetual state of incompletion; what he produced and exhibited could only ever be understood as part of an absent whole. At the same time, he insisted on Tuerie’s potentiality as fragment, its simultaneous pointing outside of itself—toward the colossal, beyond Art, at social space—as well as inward toward its own hermetic (a)logic.37 The fragment is Tuerie’s ontology. By this I do not mean that some conception of the whole simply vanishes, only that the part—the fragment—puts pressure on the whole, challenges its priority, breaks down its authority as a determining construct. Relational rather than absolute—perfect, we might say, only in its imperfection—the fragment is a negative form, which interrupts the totalizing gaze (and hence the illusion of coherence) by challenging the unambiguous value of details within the economy of the whole. For Préault, it is also violent. Or rather, in Tuerie it is violent, the result of contradictory processes. For form, in Tuerie, emerges from the fragmentation of form. Tuerie therefore belies any pretense to integration in the usual sense—its own prerogative, as it were, to be what it cannot. What completes the work is its disintegration. “If you destroy, you must also rebuild. What are you going to build on the ruins you have created?”38 Jeanron answers the question—it is the kind he imagines the “philistines,” “half-wits,” and “egoists” of the Institut putting to an artist like himself, or like Préault—in the negative: “Nothing.” This exchange, invented for the purpose, appears midway through the first installment of a two-part article Jeanron published in La Liberté in the fall of 1832. Titled “De l’anarchie dans les arts,” the article, not unlike the iconoclastic journal in which it appears, is part polemic, part manifesto. Jeanron’s target, above all, is the Institut and the mephitic doctrine it enforces with the primary purpose of reproducing itself.39 An enthusiastic reader of Philippe Buonarotti’s Histoire de la Conspiration pour l’Égalité dite de Babeuf (1828)—he painted a portrait of the great revolutionary sometime in the mid-1830s—Jeanron ends up promoting a conspiratorial course of action. Traditional culture, he contends, must be driven to the point of crisis if the arts are to be delivered from the beleaguered condition in which the Institut incarcerates them.40 Only then will the arts be equipped to confront the present; only then might freedom enter into experience.41 “We must obliterate your laws,” he writes later on, “your prescripts, your chairs, and your statutes. We have to anarchize art if we want to save it. It’s up to us, brothers, to complete this sublime work of destruction, for life subsists in the ruins.”42 The last clause illuminates the first: “Out of the ( 58 )  the revolution takes for m

anarchy through which we wish to pass the arts will emerge as if from a crucible, purged of the corrosive alloy formed by prejudice, academic tradition, and concession to the latest fashions, which are here today and gone tomorrow.”43 The “nothing” with which Jeanron’s artist responds to his dismissive interlocutors bespeaks no reckless iconoclasm, no wanton destruction for its own sake, no glib cynicism bound, despite itself, to the logic it opposes. On the contrary, it is exuberant and youthful, total and reflexive; it insists on freeing up space without occupying it, on fresh air cleansed of the stench of formaldehyde.44 “Nothing” thwarts instrumental reasoning. It promises “life.” “Death to the Institut! Death to the professoriat!” The battle cry recurs at regular intervals throughout La Liberté’s nineteen issues. Over the course of its six-month run (August 1832–February 1833), La Liberté’s stable of artists, writers, and historians developed and maintained a critical language exceptional, at the time, for its militancy and anarcho-collectivist orientation.45 Together, the journal’s principal contributors—Jeanron, Laviron, Galbaccio, the poet Pétrus Borel, Duseigneur, the painters Alfred Pommier and Alexandre Decamps, the archaeologist Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, Barthélémy Hauréau, and a third painter who called himself E. Delacroix— shared an entrenched antipathy not only to the State and its cultural institutions but also to the impoverished formalism they championed, because of which the arts remained indifferent to, even at odds with, the present conditions of life and production.46 La Liberté demanded an art that stood in direct relation to life processes, an art, therefore, whose truth content—whose social truth—was realized in moments of exchange between artist and nature.47 Art needed to be returned to life and, in turn, life to art. Only then, La Liberté concluded, might art fulfill its “true purpose” and assume its proper position at the head of “the social movement.”48 “Ours is a saintly mission, an apostolicism,” Borel wrote. “We undertake this new crusade to conquer the holy sepulcher in order to demolish it. . . . [This] is a fight to the death. Vae victis!”49 Despite the forthrightness of La Liberté’s contributors—every article intentionally bore its author’s signature—the end toward which they imagined themselves working remained, perhaps of necessity, unpronounced.50 No vivats counteract the à bas or mort à that inflects La Liberté from beginning to end; no positive standard is invoked. For these men, “liberty” (and progress) needed to be grasped negatively. Anarchie et destruction: these were La Liberté’s only principles. The tone La Liberté adopts is programmatic; its denunciations are vigorous and uncompromising, at times extreme.51 Yet nothing like a program—fixed, static, inflexible—emerges from its pages. Indeed, La Liberté considered the hypostatization of even the most radical of ideas an unforgivable betrayal. Thought had to remain fluid if it was not to distort its object; it had to avoid sedimentation if actualité was to remain its proper material. Doctrinal programs were the stuff of politics. Accordingly, La Liberté targeted for immediate demolition any and all systems of regulation and this is not a program  ( 59 )

legitimation—the Institut first and foremost, but also the cénacle and the art press, the reformist Assemblée des Artistes and its principal organ, the Journal des artistes. The men of La Liberté had no interest in improving value systems already in place; they had no interest in pats on the back or good press;52 they had no interest, as Jeanron put it, in “bastard concessions” and “petty reforms.”53 They demanded nothing short of the complete suspension of traditional culture, of the powers that manufactured it and the laws devised to keep it in place. Anything less, in their eyes, made for a sterile practice at best, an “agent of power” at worst.54 Their revendication was unconditional: “We want liberty without transaction, without compromise, without fear of what may come.”55 As Didron’s declaration makes plain, La Liberté did not balk at uncertainty or the diffuse and potentially chaotic state of affairs its call for the liquidation of traditional culture opened on to. This kind of disintegration rang truer to La Liberté and its concept of freedom than formalizing attempts to counteract (or even “preserve”) it. Divorced from present struggles, evocations of the past—whether imagined as means of escape or as means of control simply begged the question—had little purchase for a society making its own history. “When society has been shaken down to its foundations,” Laviron writes in La Liberté’s eighteenth issue, when the clamor of revolt suffuses the streets and squares; when bullets fly, and cannons thunder; when political passions blanket the streets with corpses, you find nothing better than to recount for men who still have the taste of gunpowder on their lips and the sound of the tocsin in their ears some trifling tale from times gone by, and to compensate for your inability to arouse their interest, you try to pique their curiosity by exaggerating some dreadful detail. And you have the gall to complain of the public’s indifference! No, art does not reside there. Your poetry does not strike the heart; it stops at the eyes, because you produce nothing but form.56 The present “system”—in effect, “every kind of organization in the arts”—was the enemy not only because it was unjust or because its legitimacy hinged on the maintenance of privilege or because privilege was its reward for passive obedience—what else were “reputations” built on?—but because of the ambivalence in which order and violence then stood opposed.57 If art was to be “national, actuel, social,” a formula as regularly repeated in the pages of La Liberté as any other, it had to understand existing conditions, unsublimated and fractious, as its necessary substance, and it had to allow form to respond to them, without the distance of allegory or metaphor.58 The work of art, as such, would be individual, antisystematic, negative, the form it eventually took justified by its specific and spontaneous content. Otherwise, art could claim ( 60 )  the revolution takes for m

to be nothing more than a semblance of the society whose truth it was supposed to reveal; otherwise, there was only inert, abstract form. Violence for violence, then: La Liberté figured it could rob the present order of its ideological justification and, in so doing, root out its own condition. The destruction it advocated therefore had ethical as well as aesthetic dimensions: “to destroy is progress.”59 The paradox affirmed one’s situatedness, one’s being in and of a particular time and place and one’s responsibility to them. What La Liberté opposed, after all, was not the living content of tradition but its embalming—that is to say, its appropriation and reification, its transfiguration into so many cultural goods and its transmission as so many inviolable values, the strictures of conformism.60 The (mis)appropriation of the art of the past as a medium for accepted truths in the present: this was the death-dealing spell that had to be broken; this was the sense of art’s purposefulness that prohibited art from discovering its situation, from being in rather than reproducing the present.61 I do not mean that La Liberté sought to free art from purposefulness altogether. The journal did not subscribe to the anti-utilitarian credo Gautier was then developing.62 L’art pour l’art brought art no closer to its “true purpose” than instrumentalization. La Liberté was committed; it believed that art was a form of commitment, and that it was art’s committedness that had to be actualized. What needed to be eradicated was the received understanding of art’s utility, inseparable as it had become from the egoism and mercantilism of the present order.63 “Commitment” (engagement), it should be noted, is not La Liberté’s chosen word. The journal’s writers speak, instead, of art’s “social tendency” (la tendance sociale de l’art). My substitution, albeit deliberate, is not intended to suggest that La Liberté misrecognized its own project or that it ought to have used the one instead of the other. I wish simply to allay the suspicions we might have of the latter term. “Tendency” and its correlative, “tendentiousness,” do not align in the pages of La Liberté, although I have little doubt that the journal’s political brethren—Godefroy Cavaignac, for instance, or Etienne Arago, or the Neo-Jacobins of the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen ( Jeanron and Hauréau were both members)—would have liked them to.64 In La Liberté, “tendency” and “tendentiousness” remain antithetical, the one an expression of art’s immanent relation to the world from which it comes, the other an affirmative action operating, often despite itself, under false pretenses.65 “Tendency” has to do with means. “Tendentiousness” takes its cue from presumptive ends; it abstains from calling its own existence into question. In brief, “tendentiousness” is extrinsic to art. Destruction et anarchie: “Art must be national, actuel—it needs to push for progress, it needs to cut a path.”66 Make way! The injunction exemplifies what La Liberté considered the social tendency of art in its proper sense: it sees nothing permanent. Looked at from this angle, “tendency” takes on a provisional quality distinct from its customary usage. It also comes to indicate, contra academic precept, an interactive this is not a program  ( 61 )

relationship between the form of an artwork and its content, between the work of art itself and the social world in which it discovers its material. They are taken to be mutually determining. Which is to say, La Liberté nowhere presupposes a free for itself, transcendent and unopposed, freedom in an unfree world: “It would be truly astonishing . . . if the July Revolution had been intended to create an atmosphere of pure liberty for all.”67 La Liberté’s is an aesthetics and politics of negation, not refusal. The journal’s only presumption is that it bears its own negation within itself as its own telos. Arguably, La Liberté’s valuation of impermanence, its sense that works of art can vanish without thereby diminishing themselves, constitutes its most incisive critique of bourgeois reason. The precise nature of Préault’s contribution to the publication of La Liberté, or to the elaboration of the journal’s core principles, remains unclear. None of La Liberté’s articles bears his signature, and as far as we know, he did not sit on the journal’s comité.68 Préault’s influence appears nevertheless to have run deep enough that, in 1837, Théophile Thoré could attribute to him a formative role in both the journal’s conception and its realization. Along with Galbaccio and Jeanron, Thoré tells us, Préault “belonged to that young and audacious phalanx who, after [the Revolution of 1830], imagined that art was going to conquer Liberty.” “With [Liberty] as their title,” Thoré continues, “they published a journal whose life was short but explosive [éclatante].”69 I see no reason to question the accuracy of Thoré’s remarks;70 neither do I wish to overburden them. They are cursory statements made in retrospect—and partway through a review of Galbaccio’s design for the rotunda of the Casino-Paganini. Galbaccio is Thoré’s concern, in other words, as is the architect’s tireless struggle against “the old routines.” Préault and Jeanron appear to give flesh to Thoré’s evaluation of Galbaccio’s work and to round out an appraisal of his impact on both the practice and theory of art; they are the painter and sculptor to the architect and theorist, complementary signs of a total program for the emancipation of art and the revaluation of its raison d’être. Thoré’s comments assure us, all the same, that Préault’s absence from La Liberté’s list of authors makes for a poor measure of his involvement. Over the course of his career, Préault participated in a variety of publishing ventures. In addition to La Liberté, his biographers have mentioned, among others, Le Musée and Hugo’s L’Événement. He has even been attached to Charles Blanc’s Gazette des beaux-arts.71 Préault’s forays in journalism never bore much fruit, however. He succeeded in publishing only two short articles, both in 1856 and both in Renaissance, a short-lived monthly edited by Alfred Dumesnil, Ernest Morin, and Eugène Noël.72 The two articles—the first is titled “Le statuaire moderne,” the second “L’architecture du siècle”—confirm much of what we have been told about Préault’s manner of speech: they are fast-paced, unsystematic, and paratactic, disjunctive collections of ( 62 )  the revolution takes for m

epigrammatic statements and incisive turns of phrase. Both, moreover, deploy a polemical rhetoric comparable to La Liberté’s, but reworked (I might say updated). By 1856, the resolute indignation Préault once felt had come to be mediated by a sense of despair, defeat, even failure. Take, for example, his “L’architecture du siècle,” an acerbic history of nineteenth-­ century architectural practice inspired by the eviction of his Sainte Valère from the grounds of Sainte-Clotilde. Critical of fetishizing revivals, the extravagances of wealth, and the pragmatism of capital in equal measure—the choices in 1856 seem to have been whittled down to the “neo-Gothic” or “railway stations”—Préault formulates his central question thus: “Whence will the ingenious architect come, who will realize our modern ideas while designing an architecture appropriate to our climate, to our temperament, to our new faith, and with materials native to our country? / He will not be the man of affairs, this courier of salons, this antechamber schemer, this Mâcon. / Our century goes on searching for itself. / This great architect, warm-hearted and ever intelligent, has yet to arrive.”73 Or “Le statuaire moderne”: ostensibly a collective obituary for James Pradier, François Rude, and David d’Angers, whose deaths followed one another in quick succession between 1852 and 1856, the article reads like a requiem for modern sculpture itself. Préault’s tributes, despite their brevity, are filled with irreverent turns, each of them tearing down the monument it simultaneously constructs. Pradier, who had the hands of a sculptor but never the head, set out every morning for Athens only to find himself, by day’s end, in the rue de Bréda; Rude, whose superior honesty precluded “genius,” made prose out of art; David d’Angers, forever caught between “the discomposure of [his] times” and the Academy, was unquestionably the century’s greatest sculptor, but his sculpture, always burdened by a concern for “compensation,” could not claim the equivalent honor.74 These tributes have a playfulness to them, and if we underestimate the valence of this quality, we mistake the article’s timbre, never mind the poignancy of its conclusion. We do no better if we fail to recognize the distressed earnestness that motivates them. An acute sense that Pradier, Rude, and David have left behind them a blighted wasteland of second- and third-raters haunts kind and unkind word alike. The obituary closes on a dissonant note, several disjointed lines that constitute the article’s final assessment of modern sculpture in 1856 and its possible future: “The Government in its magnanimity has issued a call to all sculptors for the decorations of the new Louvre. / It has supplied stone and gold; / For a program, the glories of France. / To work, Gentlemen, show us what you’ve got in your guts. / The result: a hundred magots. / Are these our artists? Hedgers and gasbags! If you wish to save the arts, suppress them for the next five years.”75 My goal, here, is not to establish an exact equivalence between La Liberté and Tuerie. To claim such uniformity would betray the antisystematic and destructive commitments of both projects. Above all, it would betray the postulate that both this is not a program  ( 63 )

internalize: that the social tendency of a work of art includes an artistic tendency and, correlatively, that social tendency and artistic quality must be in accord. Neither can be separated from “actualité.” Laviron and Galbaccio, in their Salon de 1833, put it this way: “Actualité and the social tendency of art concern us most; after them come truth of representation and the skillfulness of material execution. We demand actualité above all else, because we want art to affect society and steer it toward progress; we demand that art be true, because it must be alive to be understood.”76 The formulation issues no prescriptions; it describes “principles,” which the two then go on to activate in their assessment of Jeanron’s Scène de Paris (fig. 30) and Préault’s Mendicité. Of Scène de Paris: favorably disposed though Laviron and Galbaccio are to the picture’s “poignant” subject—the “anguish” of working-class poverty—which they find irreproachable and “well-conceived,” they nevertheless come down hard on Jeanron’s execution “above all” because it does not follow “the idea.”77 Of Préault’s Mendicité: “a subject suffused with local character, where contrasts of pose and physiognomy, rendered with a singular joy in making and composition, become salient; it is a scene full of pathos—the drama of hunger—in which everyone suffers and agony is made to speak for itself.” “M. Préault,” they conclude, “claims a distinguished place among sculptors who understand art in its true purpose.”78 If Laviron and Galbaccio consider the concordance of social tendency and artistic tendency in the work of art necessary to any claim art may lay to truth, they nevertheless subordinate one to the other: execution “follows” idea. Representation, for them, remains art’s priority; it is the role of representation, understood as both process and image, to perform the necessary mediations between art and the social world. The comparison above is instructive, then, because of the emphasis Laviron and Galbaccio place on artistic technique.79 What, for them, distinguishes Mendicité from Scène de Paris is not the idea driving it—indeed, the idea of both works is more or less the same—but the progressiveness of the artistic technique with which Préault realizes it and Jeanron does not. The painter represents the deprivations of poverty and the suffering of “proletarians”; he identifies these conditions as distinctly modern, an injustice of the present order of things and its adherence to the “law of privilege.” But Préault lends the experience of these conditions a new form of expression. He makes them talk (“font parler”). Unfortunately, Mendicité no longer exists; like too many of his other works in plaster, Préault destroyed it at some point. It is thought, nonetheless, to have borne a striking resemblance to Tuerie. Indeed, so manifestly were the two reliefs aligned that Gautier, in his review of Tuerie, invokes Mendicité to help his readers visualize the later work’s formal disobedience and technical difference.80 In the same vein, Laviron recalls Mendicité in conjunction with a mock toast to the ongoing incompetence of the Institut: for a second year, he boasts, it has failed to curb the rise of an artist who breaks so completely with “academic traditions.”81 We shall never know for certain how to read the ( 64 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 30  Philippe-Auguste Jeanron, Scène de Paris, 1833. Oil on canvas, 97 × 130 cm. Collection du musée des Beaux-Arts de Chartres. Photo © Ville de Chartres, musée des Beaux-Arts.

relationship between the two reliefs; we shall never know what the relationship looked like. I take the two references, regardless, to have been written less as measures of strict conformity than as attempts to affirm the centrality of artistic technique in Préault’s practice. To miss its import is to miss the work itself. Killing, in Tuerie, takes the form of the struggle to which it gives rise, and struggle, as Préault conceives it, is incoherent and illogical. Or rather, and this may get closer to Préault’s point, struggle—in particular, violent struggle—produces that mayhem. It disorients; it unfixes; it rends; it transgresses. Its articulations are also disarticulations, bodies torn asunder and ruthlessly crammed into compressed spaces. Such extreme physical conditions, which subject bodies to both external and internal pressures, generate conflict in bodies themselves, and once a body ceases to be capable of containing the internal pressures violence inflicts on it, it becomes contorted; the internal erupts and fractures it. Expressions of violence are not limited, however, to outward signs of grief, aggression, and agony. Violence in Tuerie—the violence of Tuerie—is structural as much as it is figurative, and that structural violence erupts where Préault’s commitment to figuration runs up against the relief ’s spatial contractions—that is, where the this is not a program  ( 65 )

relief ’s highly articulated figures lose their capacity to circulate freely within the space allotted them. Tuerie’s figures are sharply delineated, yet they are rendered all the more acute by the abrupt shifts between deep shadow and projection located at the points where bodies meet.82 There is a kind of syncopation within the relief ’s centrifugal swirl. Taken individually, these shifts appear instrumental: each figure emerges from the relief as if carved out, as if Tuerie were a collection of discrete, volumetric bodies, each of which occupies a space determined by his or her own becoming, a space in which he or she might twist and turn and react to incursions on that space. Préault cares about the expressiveness of individual bodies and how they respond to violence in unique ways. But Tuerie’s space is singular. The division of planes required of relief sculpture if it is to provide the illusion that its figures inhabit a notional space open to circulation—a human world—simply is not there. Instead, Préault squeezes out all signs of space and spatial recession, of perspective and coordinated proportion and rational distribution; he rids the relief of neutral intervals, jamming the interstices in the figure-action with emphatic patterning—coarsely textured passages of bronze, serpentine locks of hair, a fixating repetition of hands. The relief ’s dynamism, in turn, appears pressurized, and Tuerie’s syncopations, instead of carrying out their form-affirming work, become, rather, fissures in a single mass pulled this way and that. They are signs of separation and merger, tears in a unity to which, however, they cannot add up. Préault’s treatment of the body engaged in violent struggle drives traditional form into crisis. According to the normative principles of sculpture propounded by the Institut, the duty of sculpture was to maintain the body as a stable whole, even to guarantee that it remain so. This is not to say that for the Institut, and the classicism it advocated, sculpture needed to neutralize the body’s responsiveness to affective stimuli. The goal of sculpture was to ensure that the tension between exterior—the delimiting surface— and interior—the contingency of experience and feeling—appeared static, that the former contained the latter or at least kept it in check. Value, virtue, beauty—Art— lay there, in harmonious syntheses, in the primacy of abstract totalities, in the paradoxical way confinement assured autonomy. Préault casts light on the dark side of traditional form—its artificiality, its violence—not only by setting this tension back in motion but by allowing it, and the opposition classicism dissimulates beneath a veil of unitary form, to tear the body into pieces. The meaning-making elements of form in Tuerie assert themselves by critically dissolving those formal elements in which meaning is supposed to exist as a positive fact. In Tuerie, Préault refuses to demand of violence that it be made to conform to the current expectations for his art. Instead, he treats violence violently, forcing his materials into conflict, on the one hand, with the conventions and institutional frameworks meant to regulate them and, on the other, with the bodies to which they give shape. ( 66 )  the revolution takes for m

Tuerie, indeed, turns on the sense of unease it elicits: the relief does not seem to give form to the bodies swarming beneath its surface as much as those bodies give form to the relief, as if the material surface of Tuerie were a barrier up against which these bodies push. To put it another way, Préault activates the structural relationship between figure and surface, the one testing the resilience and resistance—the cohesiveness—of the other. Partly this is an effect of the relief ’s collapsed planes and the resulting dedifferentiation of ground. But if Préault eliminates ground, he also eliminates air. Air cannot circulate in Tuerie, cut off as it is by the tumult’s forward push and the nonporous surface of bronze. The surface suffocates. The Black figure’s gritting teeth, the woman’s clamorous wail, and the guttural wheeze of the man who, undeterred, charges headlong into the dismembered hand that strangles him produce no audible sound, and the man at lower right, with his head thrown back, does not so much exhale his final breath as gasp to make it possible, his diaphragm straining, his chest taut. Airlessness turns these expressions of violence endured into grimaces—distorted, deformed, mute. Surface in Tuerie is no kinder than purveyors of violence. It is as oppressive—as fatal—as they. Medium and space consequently become difficult to pry apart. So, too, do medium and figure. Just now I tried to describe the paradoxical way in which Tuerie’s overbearing material pressures stifle the sounds of violent conflict. I need to adjust the claim. The relief is not silent. Where I imagine sound being produced, however, is not in howls or colliding bodies or death rattles or gnashing teeth—grimaces communicate by other means—but in the shrill shriek of the sculptor’s knife penetrating metal and slicing through it. I am referring, of course, to the two gashes that mark the waxen breast of the man at lower right. There is something profoundly unsettling about these wounds, about the way metal peeled back to collect in thick, irregular knots before drying. It is as if these wounds, or at least their contours, have been cauterized, sealed at their edges but leaving the crevasses themselves bare and open. The incisions, surgical in the precision of their lines, form black, dry voids. Préault omits the rivulets of blood that usually accompany wounds of this sort; he pushes their violence beyond representation, beyond metaphor. These wounds are dug—literally, sensuously—into the relief ’s surface. When in the sculptural process these incisions appeared is open to question. I suspect, however, that Préault had to have produced them subsequent to casting. The bronze dates from 1850; in 1834 Tuerie was plaster, and that work no longer exists. All that remains of the plaster is a lithograph by Jean Gigoux (fig. 31), which Laviron published as a supplement to his Salon de 1834. There, Gigoux translates Tuerie’s frenzied activity with tremendous efficiency, yet if he gets the dynamic quality of Tuerie right—if, that is, he makes clear what is least sculptural about the relief—he seems never quite to have found an adequate pictorial solution for Préault’s contraction of space. Gigoux’s bodies occupy clearly defined positions in space and in relation to one this is not a program  ( 67 )

another. His shadows do their customary work too well, too consistently; they give us a sense of integrated form rather than pitting the salience of form against a common space too condensed for the seven figures who struggle to appropriate it. When looking at Gigoux’s lithograph, we no longer wonder about the notional distance between the woman at center and the chevalier, who, cast in even shadow, retreats into some other space behind the figures in the foreground, nor do we wonder about the relationship between the Black figure and the woman whose flowing mane he seizes with what, I believe we can now say with some certainty, is his right hand. By giving greater relief to her head, which we now read as being pulled downward and outward rather than downward and sideways, Gigoux provides us with a sense of bodies twisting in space, which allows us in turn to imagine how these bodies work as whole bodies. He gets closer to the wounded man, whose head now falls backward into the picture space, his face occluded by the crest of his upturned chin. To achieve this effect Gigoux relies on the permissible ambiguities of perspectival drawing. Arguably, Gigoux’s wounded man endures a crueler form of violence than Préault’s, his suffering translated into unnatural stiffness and erasure. That stiffness is not Préault’s. His wounded man languishes, the weight of his body registered not by a neck pulled taut after it has lost its capacity to resist gravity’s force but by two bodies—one full of vitality, the other near death—coming into contact. The contact—between thumb and breast—is intimate and affective. Here, Préault seems to say, is what it is like when bodies touch one another as a condition of survival. Gigoux’s Tuerie describes this tumultuous crowd as a coherent collection of individuated bodies, a crowd as it comes together during moments of conflict. However violent mass formation may be for Gigoux, death comes, ultimately, at the hands of others. Gigoux’s crowd describes a human space. Préault’s is pressed together by the sheer force of its wild activity; it is a crush; it slaughters. I could go on, but my point, by now, should be clear. Gigoux clarifies too much; he resolves too much. We learn more, as it were, from the lithograph’s elisions, exaggerations, and failures—its attempt at synthesis—than from what it gets right. Are we, then, to take the absence of wounds in Gigoux’s lithograph as deliberate omission? As oversight? I find it hard to believe that Gigoux would have excluded the wounds had they been there in 1834, even if their indexicality had been difficult to translate into pictorial form. Laviron makes no mention of them either. Indeed, not a single critic from 1834 mentions them. Whether the wounds date from 1850 or 1834 matters little. I take them, regardless, as clarifications, sites at which the relief ’s various forms of violence coincide. The wounds need not be there, in other words. The questions they raise inhere in the relief itself: in the remorselessness of its anticlassicism, in the restless heterogeneity of its references, in the discontinuousness of its formal expression but also in its destructive character, its lawlessness. The wounds actualize these actions and those impulses; they render ( 68 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 31  Jean Gigoux, after Tuerie, 1834. Lithograph. Published in Laviron, Salon de 1834. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

them indelibly present, the irremediable result of the coefficient of friction in the work itself. If their date of origin eludes us, this indeterminability does not cloud their broader implications; it enriches them. Undatable, the wounds become indices of exact and defiant gestures performed in time, yet in a time we cannot grasp as continuous or homogeneous. We cannot understand them in terms of strict causality. They exist, rather, as eruptions, disjunctions, and wreckage. They expose the work. Put differently, the wounds give vent to the desultory and irreconcilable in Tuerie, to its incongruous temporalities and illogical spatialities; at the same time, they confront us with their own—indeed, with sculpture’s—material enactment. They are the matter of technique, of technique as factual and, as such, disruptive. The wounds, once present, figure that dissonance. They appear as signs of discomposure in the making. To sum up: with Tuerie Préault takes the violence coded in traditional form, turns this violence back upon that form, and liquidates it. He refrains, however, from this is not a program  ( 69 )

appropriating the absence created, from issuing a new standard. The non-repeatability of Tuerie’s extremism thereby becomes the motor driving it beyond its fallible form. “Nothing”: Préault shares Jeanron’s thirst for a complete reduction; he shares his friend’s distrust of permanence and totality. For neither, however, does “nothing” devolve to hopelessness. It does not assert itself against the social. It is not nihilistic. In the absence, Préault and Jeanron see mobility and renewal, a new process of transmission, an open way. For them, in other words, absence indicates not a lack of fulfillment but unfulfillability; it makes the unfulfillable matter, as critique but also as promise, the promise of nothing. Absence, as such, gives way to the particular, to the negative force of the actual, to the individual at odds with the social totality. It enables freedom. “Life,” Ernest Chesneau wrote, “was the gift of Préault’s art.”83 Tuerie was the last work Préault succeeded in showing at the Salon until 1848, when Jeanron became directeur des Musées nationaux and, for the year at least, dissolved the jury system. He had moderately better luck finding commissions, but they arrived only intermittently. Time and again, Préault was forced to turn to David d’Angers for help— to beg him for work, to beg him to intercede. Préault’s studio grew increasingly cluttered, which obliged him to sculpt and destroy simultaneously; one by one Mendicité, Misère (another work from 1833), and Parias were reduced to dust. Tuerie survived—why we cannot say—and in 1850, when resources became available, Préault had the relief cast in bronze before sending it back to the Salon. Critics responded much as they did in 1834. Only now, in 1851, Tuerie was “famous.”84 “During those white-hot years of Romanticism this thing appeared especially ferocious.”85 Tuerie had solidified into an emblem from another time, with its destructive character, once deserving of public execution, now fixed in bronze. It had become a part of tradition. The critics of 1851 nevertheless (perhaps I should say “fittingly” or “accordingly”) found Tuerie even more unintelligible than they did in 1834. The lacunae had deepened and widened.86 “What!” Joseph Méry blustered in La Mode, “it’s Préault, a man so charming, so spiritual, so light! It’s he who gave the world this hellish vision.”87 “It’s art for art’s sake,” sneered Paul Rochery, “empty, dead form.”88 Prosper Haussard saw vengeance in the bronze, reparation for a decade of institutional abuse; for the critic of Le National, Tuerie embodied “the spirit of 1848.”89 Gautier, who otherwise strayed little from what he had written seventeen years earlier, no longer saw “battle.” At least he could not say it, even had he wanted to, in the pages of La Presse. No one considered Tuerie’s return in light of the June Days; the coincidence—that repetition—went unnoticed. No one spoke of the wounds.

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•3 A Monstrous Pile of Men and Stone Excidat illa dies aevo! (Perish the memory of this day!) —Jules Michelet, Journal, June 23, 1848

H

ad Haussard followed through on his intuition, truly scrutinizing what it meant for Tuerie to embody “the spirit of 1848” in 1851, he might have felt compelled to compare Préault’s bas-relief with Ernest Meissonier’s Souvenir de guerre civile (fig. 32). Both works were exhibited at the Salon that year, and both portrayed massacres. Only the one, a sculpture, showed a massacre in the making, abstract and extreme and frantic; the other, a painting, described the outcome in excruciating, arresting detail, the power of its crystalline image inseparable from its historical specificity—this barricade, this street, on this day in June 1848. No doubt it would have been a strange exercise. The comparison would have pushed Haussard not only to think across mediums but also to conjoin the political realities of the après-juin and the retour à l’ordre of 1834– 35. In the winter of 1851, the constellation might have appeared portentous; the Bonapartists were growing restless. Above all, however, the comparison would have forced Haussard to emphasize scale. Meissonier’s painting presented the aftermath of the June Days of 1848 in miniature, 29 by 22 centimeters to Tuerie’s 109 by 140. Souvenir de guerre civile is a picture of defeat. The ruins of an insurgent barricade, scattered left and right, stretch across its foreground; behind the rubble appear the corpses of the men who defended it. Most of these men—their blue and white smocks mark them as workers—have been grouped in crowded clusters, each lifeless body slumped over or propped up by the next. A few others lie at the curbsides or on the barricade

Fig. 32  Ernest Meissonier, Souvenir de guerre civile, 1849–50. Oil on canvas, 29 × 22 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

itself. The result, a dense web of interwoven bodies, renders it difficult, at times, to determine which limb belongs to which man. These rebels have been rent of what makes them individual and whole. In this instance, union occurs while coming undone. Directly behind this “omelette d’hommes,” as one critic referred to the agglomeration of bodies, a segment of the street has been denuded of its pavement;1 it is the quarry from which these rebels gathered the materials for their fateful redoubt. Excavated in the hope that some better world might lie beneath the surface, the trench now suggests nothing so much as the common grave to which these men will likely be relegated. Everything in this narrow street lined with irregular, blank façades and thick with corpses has been reduced to a funereal stillness and silence. The windows have been boarded up; the shops are shut; the street’s one gas lamp has been extinguished. Only a single window shutter on the second floor, slightly ajar, reminds us that life once went on as usual in the rue Geoffrey de l’Asnier. At present, not a soul stirs in this street at once so ordinary and yet so haunting. Death has a repellent beauty in the picture; the city has none. The barricade, for Meissonier, is a site of failure, not to say futility. Accordingly, his picture offers a stern warning to rebels of the future.2 Yet for all its forthrightness, all the venom in its recrimination, the painting stops short of stridency. It does not scold; it does not curse. The fate of the rebel, to be sure, is nowhere in doubt—nor, for that matter, are our presumed loyalties. Here’s where we stand. There’s where they lie. So much is clear. Still, the painting appears oddly restrained, even reticent or obdurate. Its description is impassive, its image crisp and hard, as if all that needs to be known lies open on the surface. To Meissonier’s critics, the painting’s matter-of-fact detailing indicated the absence of parti pris. “It’s a page out of history,” Gautier maintained, “exact as an official report, without emphasis, without rhetoric, a specimen of that genuine truth [vérité vraie] about which no one wishes to speak, painters no more than writers: the Morgue of the uprising captured by the daguerreotype, the debris of revolution on the city’s pavement—blood, rags, and decrepit, meaningless corpses.”3 A praiseworthy quality, impartiality in Gautier’s account nevertheless has a destructive effect; it voids. “Genuine truth” translates into “debris,” “rags,” “decrepit, meaningless corpses,” the facts of rebellion prized apart from their value. Meissonier’s painting, then, hinges on a paradox. The realization of significance coincides with its abolition. That is, significance negates itself through its opposite in order to be. Representation in Souvenir de guerre civile therefore performs a specific operation: the painting keeps its rebels silent by making them visible. When civil war broke out on June 23, 1848, the dynamics of barricade fighting changed for good. Previous barricade events—1830, 1832, 1834, February 1848—had all targeted a single enemy: monarchy. In them, the illusion of common cause worked to subsume divergent political and social interests, albeit in varying degrees at different historical a monstrous pile of men and stone  ( 73 )

conjunctures. At no point, however, had the alliance of classes been accorded greater significance than it was in February 1848, when a reunified “people” forced Louis-Philippe’s abdication and dissolved the July Monarchy. The reconciliation of classes, worker and bourgeois marching hand in hand under the banner of universal fraternity, emerged retroactively as the revolution’s organizing principle, casting into shadow the pervasive social antagonisms that shaped civil life under the “citizen king.” La Réforme exulted: the “two enemy peoples” abetted by July Monarchy “have settled their differences [se sont reconnues] on the barricades.”4 As in 1830, Paris’s print industry churned out lithograph after lithograph to corroborate the message: the fortifying embrace of worker, bourgeois, and National Guard (“L’Union fait la force!”); workers baring their breasts and appealing to their “frères”— “Tirez donc si vous voulez”; all of Paris posing triumphantly around a barricade surmounted by allegorical figures of Liberty, Unity, Solidarity, Friendship, the Republic.5 These images of shared victory and “universal sympathy” were seductive, irresistible. Here, it seemed, the collectivism of Rousseau’s social contract—namely, his vision of a political body in which each of its members formed an indivisible part of the whole— had received its final expression. Yet just as the Second Republic introduced a new horizon of politics, so too, in Karl Marx’s words, had it “uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the protective, concealing crown.”6 This staging of transfiguration and social healing turned, as it were, on the power of the Republic’s image makers to affirm the legacy of the Revolution—indeed, to announce its fulfillment— while masking its limits, the as yet “undeveloped” contradictions and conflicts that, Marx says, remained dormant, a mere background of words and phrases, until June. “Generous as ever, [the people] imagined it had destroyed its enemy when it had only overthrown the enemy of its enemy, the common enemy.”7 A Provisional Government was selected by acclamation on February 24, and within days this eleven-member council reformed French civil society from the top down. The Provisional Government established National Workshops to assist Paris’s unemployed; it democratized the National Guard; it set up the Luxembourg Commission (La Commission de Gouvernement pour les travailleurs) to examine the conditions of labor and to find the most expedient ways of improving them; it declared a “right to work” and acknowledged the necessity of association.8 The list goes on: the Provisional Government suppressed the octroi and shortened the working day; it ended imprisonment for debt. It abolished censorship, the death penalty for political offenses, slavery. On March 5, in one of its most celebrated if star-crossed acts, the Provisional Government expanded the franchise to all men over the age of twenty-one, nullifying property qualifications and restrictions based on capacity. Free elections for the National Assembly were set for April 9. As if overnight, France had become a democratic and social republic. Huzzahs reverberated east and west. ( 74 )  the revolution takes for m

This printemps des peuples was short-lived. By mid-March the Provisional Government was already pulling the reins on the social republic, accruing to itself an independent and inviolable moral authority that would eventually pit representative against represented, government against people.9 The telltale sign came on March 17, when the Parisian clubs, wishing to compel the Provisional Government to delay elections to the National Assembly and the National Guard, marched through the capital. Their demands were simple, even modest: relocate all regular troops outside the city walls and postpone the elections by three months, thereby affording the clubs time to organize and educate the newly empowered electorate.10 Alphonse de Lamartine, who addressed the crowd as the Provisional Government’s de facto leader (officially, he was minister of foreign affairs), denied the legitimacy of their protest. Instead, he charged the marchers with factionalism and therefore placed them—this “mass”—in violation of la raison générale.11 In the new order, Lamartine reminded those assembled before him, law was the expression of the general will; accordingly, citizens were obliged to obey and resistance was a crime. “Sovereign” and “subject” indicated correlative positionalities.12 On the seventeenth, Lamartine thus made plain the contradiction on which the politics of the Second Republic rested: for the voice of “the people” to be heard, for it to become truly sovereign and inviolable, the people themselves—“the real people”—had to hold their tongues.13 Needless to say, the April elections returned conservative majorities. By June, and following the debacle of May 15, when a march by the Parisian clubs—this time Polish independence provided the ostensible mot d’ordre— morphed into an ad hoc putsch, the tides had turned for good.14 Having grown weary of the expense paid out each day to the unemployed—and fearful of the hundred thousand workers who gathered every morning on the Champs de Mars, the so-called boulevard du Socialisme—the National Assembly, on June 22, issued a proclamation that effectively dissolved the National Workshops.15 Although perceived at the time as a guarantee of the worker’s right to existence, the National Workshops were in fact little more than a short-term response to economic and practical necessity.16 At least this was how Lamartine, who considered the “organization of labor” an affront to property, later explained their design and justified their closure. In compensation for the loss of wages, the government offered workers who relied on the Workshops one of two options. Able-bodied enlistees between ages seventeen and twenty-five were pressed to sign up for the army; those unwilling or unfit to serve were to be shipped off to the provinces to perform roadwork, ditch canals, or drain marshes. Deadening piecework somewhere else: this was what remained of the “right to work.” The message was all too clear. And indeed, it was the latter of the two options—forced deportation from the capital, forced dislocation, forced alienation— that set revolt in motion.17 Later that evening, a regiment of Workshop enlistees, led by Louis Pujol, marched to the Luxembourg, the seat of Alexandre Marie’s Ministry a monstrous pile of men and stone  ( 75 )

of Public Works, to protest their lot. Marie was firm, unapologetic, uncompromising. Rebuffed, Pujol and his men responded in kind: “We won’t go [on n’part pas]!”18 The next day barricades went up around the eastern districts of the city. The barricades of June therefore had a defensive dimension to them. They were raised, on the one hand, to assert the worker’s “right to the city” and, on the other, to safeguard the Republic against faux amis—in short, against enclosure.19 Republic faced off against Republic, in other words, or rather one image of the Republic, “la communauté,” confronted another, “la propriété.” It would prove a fight to the death. By refusing to comply with the demands of their representatives—“on n’part pas!”—the June rebels exercised a kind of democracy the Second Republic had not made room for. This was democracy as disobedience, contradiction, right of veto. Marx called the insurrection the first great class war;20 Alexis de Tocqueville called it a slave war;21 Lamartine called it sedition.22 Incapable of seeing the demos in the mob—of seeing, that is, beyond a government elected by the very same “people” who now rose up against it—Hugo considered the insurrection more or less incomprehensible, “an exception, which the philosophy of history finds almost impossible to classify.”23 For the anonymous men and women behind the barricades, it was an “insurrection of hunger.”24 The stakes were higher than ever. “The people” was at war with itself. The institution of universal (manhood) suffrage, which ushered millions into political existence and granted them, at least in letter, participatory parity, reoriented the framework within which “the people” had by then come to be known and understood. A government communiqué dated March 19 explained the import of the new law: “The [forthcoming] elections,” the bulletin read, “will belong to everyone without exception. No longer is there a proletariat in France.”25 The last sentence was (and is) the most revealing, for it lent formal equality a social dimension by correlating the question of suffrage and the issue of social division. Universal suffrage, Pierre Rosanvallon has argued, thereby assumed a sacramental power; voting became a “rite of passage, a ceremony of inclusion.”26 The result, however, was a paradox. The electoral law of March 5 recognized “the people” as the source of legitimate democratic authority; by the same token, it converted “the people” into an effect of political practice.27 Hereafter, “the people” belonged to civil society, a social totality that presaged a national future free from social antagonism and revolution.28 “The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one.”29 The Provisional Government’s image of universal suffrage hinged on the compatibility of formal democracy with Rousseau’s mandate for an indivisible body politic, without which “the people” would lose its quality as “the people.”30 Opening the doors to the pays légal had less to do, as it were, with encouraging the newly enfranchised to act on their true ( 76 )  the revolution takes for m

diversity than it did with establishing a national consensus. Lamartine’s rebuke of the March 17 demonstrators made this much clear. To identify as “prolétaire” after March 5 was to insist on the continued prevalence of social difference and social dividedness— on a disharmony of interests—within the reconstituted nation. It was to challenge the symbol universal suffrage had become; indeed, it was to question universal suffrage as such, to expose it as a constructive action that converted social value—“the essence of popular reason,” as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon put it—into a specious sum of so many partial numbers.31 In short, “prolétaires” belied the validity of democratic representation. “There is not and never can be legitimate representation of the People”: as Proudhon saw it, universal suffrage abounded in metaphysical properties.32 In return for the sacrifice of individual agency, it promised equality before the law.33 The outcome was clear: “everyone has become bourgeois.” Official responses to the April elections were largely positive. The conservative complexion of the Constituent Assembly notwithstanding, the Republic, as political form, would live to see another day. Of course, not everyone was so sure; not everyone proved so willing to acquiesce to the terms of a Pyrrhic victory. On April 26, three days after votes were cast, the Second Republic, now “legal,” faced its first challenge. That day Rouen’s beleaguered workers congregated before the town mairie to hear the election results. The news was not good: Frederick Deschamps, a commissaire de la République and a chief organizer of the National Workshops, had lost to Antoine Sénard, a moderate lawyer whom the Provisional Government had previously installed as Rouen’s attorney general. Dismayed, the crowd grew restive. The National Guard mobilized, closed in on the crowd, and dispersed it by force. Outmanned and unarmed, the Rouennais, now in protest, withdrew to their neighborhoods, where they began prying up paving stones. As they saw it, Deschamps’s defeat signaled the imminent repudiation of republican ideals. The republic needed defense, and indeed, they justified their call to arms on such grounds.34 With Sénard’s approval, the National Guard acted swiftly and ruthlessly. The insurrection was over by the twenty-seventh. Approximately thirty-four men died over the course of that brief day and a half; many more were wounded; many others were imprisoned. To the defeated, the brutality of the repression possessed a distinctive, familiar quality: “the rue Transnonain,” Auguste Blanqui fulminated, “has been surpassed.”35 The uprising in Rouen confronted the Second Republic with a difficult question. Here, after all, were champions of the Republic turning arms against it. Here was “the people” insisting on divisions that only a week before had been relegated to the past. By refusing to cooperate, Rouen’s workers, “the real people,” rebelled against “the imaginary people” (the terms are Marx’s).36 The government responded with a curious refusal of its own: “Let’s not sift through these events for evidence of scissions that we know a monstrous pile of men and stone  ( 77 )

no longer exist among us. Let’s not forget, citizens, the great, sacred device—Fraternity—inscribed on our glorious flags and on the pediments of our public monuments. Let’s not forget that fraternity means love, charity, tolerance, conciliation, trust, respect, mutual understanding [indulgences réciproques].”37 Recognition of what had happened in Rouen, that le monde ouvrier had asserted itself in noncompliance with the Second Republic, was, it seems, too risky. Instead, the government doubled down on its usual stylistics, manifested here as a rhetorical to-and-fro between negative exhortations and symbolic affirmations, as if the one served as antidote to the other, or rather as anesthetic. Once again, the Second Republic’s unitary image of “the people” hinged on a loss of memory. “In Paris, the reds and the whites, proletarians and conservatives, have been at war because the revolution did not abolish the proletariat.”38 This is Thoré on June 24. By then, eastern Paris bristled with barricades, the city was under a state of siege, and the National Assembly had ceded executive authority to General Eugène Cavaignac. Both sides had already suffered heavy casualties, and an end to the uprising remained far from sight. Indeed, against the odds, the rebellion had gained ground. Insurgents occupied key strategic points throughout the east: the Porte Saint-Denis, the Porte Saint-Martin, the Place de la Bastille, the Panthéon. The Hôtel de Ville, crown jewel of any insurrection, looked to be next. Frightened by the speed at which the rebellion was spreading, the National Assembly called on the provinces for reinforcements. The countryside duly responded: thousands of National Guards, largely from the north, converged on the city over the next few days, each, in his own way, spoiling for a fight. “An atmosphere of civil war enveloped the whole of Paris,” Tocqueville observed. “It filled the quarters where there was no fighting as much as those that served as theaters of war; it penetrated into our houses, around, above, below us.”39 The privilege of being a spectator had disappeared. Ground gained quickly became ground lost. By the twenty-fifth, only the faubourg Saint-Antoine remained in rebel hands. That afternoon Sénard, now president of the National Assembly, met with delegates from Saint-Antoine to negotiate an armistice. The rebels phrased their terms thus: “We don’t want to spill the blood of our brothers. We have always fought for a democratic Republic. If we agree to stem the progress of the bloody revolution now under way, we do so on the condition that we be recognized as citizens. We demand that our rights and duties as French citizens be upheld.” Sénard replied: “If you wish truly to retain that title, those rights, and to fulfill your duties as French citizens, tear down your barricades at once. In their presence we see only insurgents in you. Put an end to all resistance. Submit and, like children who have strayed, return to the arms of the Republic.”40 These were conditions of surrender, not

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peace. The Second Republic, which attempted to make the schism of Rouen disappear by denying it, now adopted the logic of rupture as its own. There was, as Sénard made clear, no option of being both “citoyen” and “insurgé.” To choose the latter was to choose estrangement, banishment from the political.41 Larmartine spoke even more directly to the point: to be an insurgent was to be “non de peuple.”42 Leveling judgment on the legitimacy of the rebels’ actions—of political violence as such—hereafter demanded that one take sides. “The people,” and the Republic with it, had “split all the way down to the ground.”43 The insurrection crumbled the following day, after a final standoff at the intersection of rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Place de la Bastille. Reprisals were summarily exacted and merciless. The unluckiest on the rebel side faced the firing squad; others, deportation to one of France’s penal colonies. For the most part, trials were deemed unnecessary. Political clubs and radical newspapers—scorned, if tolerated, offspring of the February Revolution—suffered a comparable fate. One by one the spaces of appearance and action—the spaces of politics and political praxis— were closed up. As the smoke began to settle, Cavaignac issued a proclamation in which he made the terms of victory crystal clear: “In Paris,” he declared, “I see vanquishers, the vanquished. I’ll be damned if I admit to seeing victims.”44 Cavaignac, whose reputation was tied to the conquest of Algeria, had brought the logic of colonialism home.45 Meissonier’s Souvenir de guerre civile stands apart from nearly every other picture of the June barricades. In general, the painters and printmakers who address the uprising either eliminate the insurgent or, as is often the case, reduce him to traces or effects— glimpses of National or Mobile Guards felled in combat, houses devastated by gunfire, billows of smoke wafting out of nearby windows and doors, the barricade. Édouard de Beaumont and Eugène Cicéri’s Barricade de la rue Clovis (fig. 33), a lithograph published in Le Charivari as part of an ongoing series titled Souvenirs des journées de juin, and N.-E. Gabé’s Prise du Panthéon (fig. 34) exemplify the typical response. In both, the rebel forces have been rendered emblematically—in a segment of street stripped of its pavement, a sandy hellmouth more than a grave, that consumes a fallen soldier; in a pock-marked, smoldering Panthéon—which, in turn, lends them a spectral quality, one whose shapeshifting translates into an eerily powerful vector of immanent destruction. Rebellion appears more like contagion than contestation. The infection having taken hold, it threatens to eat away at the city—at the foundations of society—from the inside out. Consequently, for those we do see, the heroes of “order,” fighting to eradicate the foreign contaminant seems not so much a declaration of civil war as a rescue effort.

a monstrous pile of men and stone  ( 79 )

Fig. 33  Édouard de Beaumont and Eugène Cicéri, Barricade de la rue Clovis. Lithograph, 28.5 × 20.7 cm. Le Charivari, August 7, 1848. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

Casting the June Days in this way served a political end. With the advent of universal suffrage, the barricade was widely believed to have lost its legitimacy as a means of collective action and came to symbolize instead a regressive form of unreasonable, criminal violence perpetrated by those who stood against civil society.46 The barricade, its critics argued, promoted not only an antidemocratic political practice but a senseless and, ultimately, sterile one; in other words, it offered a lie in place of a remedy, the perversion of the principles of popular sovereignty rather than their reentrenchment.47 A well-known lithograph from April (fig. 35), which shows an homme du peuple casting a ballot with his right hand as he pushes aside a rifle with his left, delivers the message with patent clarity. “That’s for foreign enemies,” the caption reads, “this is how one dutifully fights adversaries at home.” The right to vote and the right of insurrection were irreconcilable.48 “The people” as such did not build barricades. According to this ( 80 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 34  N.-E. Gabé, Prise du Panthéon, 1849. Oil on canvas, 69 × 100 cm. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet— Histoire de Paris. Fig. 35  M. L. Bosredon, Ça c’est pour l’ennemi du dehors, pour le dedans, voici comment l’on combat loyalement les adversaires, 1848. Lithograph, 22.5 × 16.9 cm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

view, those who rose up in June were not so much motivated as “misled” (égarés) by the barricade and the social malaise it promised to alleviate. Not for nothing did nearly every period account of the June Days describe the uprising as lacking coherence, principle, or mot d’ordre. The threat of genuine dissensus—namely, the threat that the Second Republic’s own legitimacy might be at stake, that the violence it administered might therefore be unjustifiable—had to be held at bay. The Republic and the “true people” it claimed to represent had to stand firmly—unambiguously, unequivocally—in front of the barricade.49 What strikes me most about these pictures, and countless others like them, is that the June rebels are not merely faceless or otherwise rendered anonymous. Nor have they been subjected to the distortions of caricature and the simplifications of stereotype. They are nowhere to be seen.50 The June Days, these pictures insist, constituted a war waged against buildings and barricades—against “walls,” as Tocqueville put it.51 The strategy, though not unpredictable, is no less effective, for in leaving no room for the rebels in their image-history, these pictures reorient the fundamental dynamics of the civil war they purport to depict.52 Indeed, by dis-figuring rebellion, by recasting it as sense-less violence—incoherent, audible only as noise, as crackling wood and exploding shells and death rattles—they rob the rebel’s resistance of articulacy, of the expressiveness and meaningfulness essential to dissident action, in short, of political existence. Rebellion, here, has no place in the communal spaces of the public realm. Rebels do not belong to them; they are to be hated. Unsurprisingly, then, pictures like these avoid entering the interior regions of the quartier. Seeing, for them, stops at the Panthéon, the Église Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, the Porte Saint-Denis, the Bastille. It terminates at the barricade. Meissonier first recorded his impressions of June in a watercolor rapidly put down in the summer of 1848 (fig. 36). He then translated his initial assessment into a finely tuned oil painting between the fall of 1848 and the summer of 1849. Meissonier had every intention of exhibiting the canvas at that year’s Salon. But as the opening of the exhibition neared, he balked, withdrawing his submission just before the official catalogue went to press. What, in the final instance, compelled Meissonier to change his mind about the picture is not known for certain, but one of two factors (maybe both together) seems likely to have informed the decision. Either the painting, in his eyes, was not quite finished—Meissonier was a notoriously fussy artist—or the memory of the event it represented was still too fresh for the Salon public to bear witness to yet again.53 An anodyne fumeur took its place. Over the course of the next year, Meissonier’s concerns must have subsided, for he resubmitted the painting in 1850, along with four others, all of which spoke directly to his customary style and to his customary audience: a lute player, a Sunday gathering set in the eighteenth century, a painter ( 82 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 36  Ernest Meissonier, La Barricade, 1848. Watercolor, 26 × 21 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Michèle Bellot).

showing some drawings to a connoisseur, and a portrait, all of them on the same miniature scale, all of them ready to adorn the walls of Paris’s well-to-do. By the time Meissonier sent the painting to the Palais-National, he had also changed its title, from Juin, a designation provocative and poignant in its plainness, simplicity, and specificity, to a more capacious, even lyrical-sounding Souvenir de guerre civile. On the whole, Salon critics were pleased with what Meissonier’s painting had to say, even if, as many would remark, it forced them to look closely at things they would rather not. An artillery captain of the National Guard unit that overtook this barricade, Meissonier had a hand in creating the scene he would then record. For him, participation was anything but heroic, even if impelled by a felt sense of necessity. Indeed, he found the experience profoundly traumatic, as much an act of collusion as of dutiful service to the cause of order—“madness of the people and madness of the bourgeoisie.”54 Here is Meissonier himself describing the incident in a letter to the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens: At the time I was an artillery captain in the National Guard. During the three days we had been fighting, I had seen men in my battalion killed and wounded. The insurrection surrounded the Hôtel de Ville, where we were, and when this barricade in the rue de la Mortellerie had been taken, I saw, in all its horror, the defenders slain, shot down, thrown from windows, covering the ground with their corpses, the earth having not yet drunk up all the blood. It was then that I heard this terrible exchange, which, better than any other, sums up how, during this dreadful war of the streets, men were beside themselves: “Were all these men guilty,” Marast [sic] asked an officer of the republican guard. “Rest assured, Mr. Mayor, not more than a quarter of them were innocent.”55 Meissonier locates the battle at the intersection of the rue Geoffrey de l’Asnier and the rue de la Mortellerie, a name derived from the mortar masons who piled into the squalid tenements that lined its north side. In 1835, however, the street’s residents successfully petitioned to have its name changed to rue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. The first syllable of Mortellerie—mort—had simply proved too dreary a reminder of the street’s recent history: popular belief had it that the street, overcrowded and severely depressed, was a hothouse for the spread of cholera in 1832.56 Constance Hungerford has suggested that Meissonier, in conjuring the street’s former moniker, sought to equate cholera and civil war, both of them scourges that bring death to guilty and blameless alike.57 Be this as it may, the reference also has the effect of drawing its reader and its writer into the complex temporality of recollection, whose purposeful, deliberate details speak of memory’s consolidation into an image that can then be recounted. Meissonier, in the ( 84 )  the revolution takes for m

way he relates his experience, seems to be searching for an authorial voice somewhere between testimony and history. Written in the fall of 1890, the letter is, after all, a remorseful look back on the event and the image to which it gave rise. Meissonier died the following year. Just before the account quoted above, Meissonier describes the degree to which the trauma he experienced on the night of June 25 shaped the picture he would subsequently go on to produce: “When I made [the watercolor], I was still reeling from the spectacle I had just seen, and believe me, dear Alfred, these things enter deep into your soul. When one reproduces them, it’s not to create a work of art [œuvre]; it’s that one has been shaken to the core, and the memory [souvenir] of it mustn’t be allowed to fade.” If we take Meissonier at his word, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t, the act of picturing the event to which he bore witness was an exercise in cathexis. By fixing the experience, he might then, or so he thought, apprehend it. The œuvre only comes later in this account, as a by-product of the initial procedure. Executed shortly after the event itself, the watercolor might well have done this kind of psychological work for Meissonier. His horror is everywhere inscribed in the picture he produced—in the foreground figure whose head is turned such that it looks to be missing, whose right arm appears severed at the elbow, and whose foot, now shoeless, has the rounded edges of an undifferentiated stump, or in the figure at center whose eyes and mouth, still agape, speak of that agonizing moment as death finally prevails, but also in the forced certainty of the drawing and in the way it struggles, despite its evident proficiency, to give clear definition to the forms it delineates. Look at how the mixtures of blue, white, and red with which Meissonier fills out the watercolor seem not to inhere as integral parts of the objects they describe but are instead applied flatly on top of the drawing, paying little heed to the contours meant to confine them or, for that matter, to the difference between hand and smock, as if the role of color in the picture were not description at all but to give the image a redeemable meaning it otherwise would not have had. Done in crayon, the coloring appears at once pasty, thick, and somehow washed out—it is a ghastly tricolor. Such an embattled manner of execution is uncommon in Meissonier’s œuvre; in general, his control borders on the authoritarian.58 It is as if Meissonier were both repelled and captivated by the object taking shape in front of him. Delacroix, whose enthusiasm for the watercolor prompted Meissonier to give it to him in 1849, remarked at the time that the watercolor lacked the “je ne sais quoi that makes an objet d’art of an objet odieux.”59 Surely he was right. Art, in this instance, remained a secondary concern. It was the odious that mattered most, that had to be locked down. Thus far I have emphasized the dividedness of traumatic experience. I could just as easily have described Meissonier’s watercolor as violent, even cruel, its discomposure driven by anger, misunderstanding, and fear. Both seem to me appropriate. I have a monstrous pile of men and stone  ( 85 )

chosen to stress the disturbances of psychic rupture, however, because they, more than Meissonier’s political beliefs, help us see the radical difference between the watercolor and the oil. In the translation, Meissonier’s priorities shift top to bottom, and the souvenir, in the final product, solidifies into a kind of trope, an effect of picturing rather than vice versa. Much of what gives the watercolor its sense of immediacy is the seeming disorderliness or spontaneity of the way Meissonier arranges his vanquished insurgents, an effect heightened by the stretches of empty space between and around the bodies in front and those in back. This is indeed how such bodies would likely fall in battle, on top of one another, but also apart from one another. These passages of empty space—empty of bodies, but also, in large part, of mark-making—lend the watercolor its air of hopeless desolation. In the oil, Meissonier eliminates most of that empty space, having filled out the right side with three extra bodies and the left foreground with sharply defined paving stones. He then sequestered the painting’s corpses by introducing the quarried hollow behind them. In addition, Meissonier inserted an elegant, if banal, lamp fixture, which juts peculiarly from the building at left—it should be slightly angled if it is to conform to the picture’s perspective—and in its delicacy serves as a telling antithesis to the indecent collection of corpses beneath it. As the gas lamp shifts the picture’s perspective from an oblique angle to a frontal vantage, it would seem to suggest, in all its claims to modernity, that the forward march of history will right this scene in one way or another. Rather than activate the image, however, the iron fixture, a few black lines set against the gray approximation of the built environment, enforces the sense of futility that saturates the picture as a whole. On the one hand, the detail Meissonier adds to the oil heightens the contrast between the painting’s upper and lower halves, the one a liquid, loose mixture of browns, blacks, and grays designating the funneled perspective of the street and the apartment blocks that line it, the other a porcelaneous combination of reds, blues, and whites—of smocks and flesh and clotting blood—that gives a fired solidity to the accretions of bodies and paving stones. On the other hand, and as a corollary of the first, the accumulated detail of the oil produces a foreground that appears as compact and vivid as it is impoverished. Between watercolor and oil, Meissonier executed at least ten preparatory drawings of individual bodies and the cityscape (figs. 37–38). Working from a preliminary, fully resolved watercolor to oil was something unprecedented for him, so he returned to the model and the life study before building them back up into another picture. Through the procedures of preparatory drawing, Meissonier worked out not only the dispositions of individual corpses—set at this angle to the picture surface, with so much foreshortening, with this orientation to right and left, top and bottom—but also the undulations and folds of smocks and pants, ensuring that they appear to correspond ( 86 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 37  Ernest Meissonier, study for Souvenir de guerre civile, 1848–50. Graphite, black crayon, and gouache, 14 × 21.3 cm. Collection Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Poissy, inv. MP.82.1.2. Photo © Ville de Poissy / R.-P. Ribière.

Fig. 38  Ernest Meissonier, study for Souvenir de guerre civile, 1848–50. Graphite, black crayon, and gouache, 13.5 × 19.5 cm. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Hervé Lewandowski).

to the bend of a knee and the languid twist of a body that has just collapsed under its own dead weight. Each study is distinct, a single body—first nude, then, on a separate sheet, clothed—hovering within an empty, groundless space. There are no paving stones in the drawings; the street, like the barricade, is absent. What mattered, at this stage, was not the relation of one body to the next, or the interaction between the body and the built environment, but the isolated occurrence of death, particular only in its experience and the shape of its final appearance. The city undergoes similar treatment, a similar process of concretion: doors and windows confirmed to be here, so tall, and so wide, cornices locked down in their mismatched heterogeneity yet unable, all the same, truly to interrupt the drab monotony of the tenement block, the slow rise of the street and the height of the curb given their proper measure. Meissonier does not repeat this drawing; instead, he divides it internally, bringing the distant view closer to the surface—it sits below rather than side by side with its counterpart—as if to correct human vision or overcome its restrictedness. Fragmentation, here, is pitted against its constitutively disruptive potential; it is drawn into the service of mastery, of a totalizing perception. Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that Meissonier’s work from the model led him, in the oil, to reaffirm the corporeal integrity of the mutilated figure in the foreground of his watercolor. What in the initial recording conveys an air of urgency and indecision, speaks of lived experience and horror, ends up reading like a compulsive need to put things just so. In a final gesture, Meissonier removed the date—1848—from beside his signature. Yet the most conspicuous difference between the watercolor and the oil is, of course, in the handling. Gone in large part is the tension so palpable in the watercolor, the incompatible mixture of tremulousness and concentration that activates its image, disempowers the constraints of form, and, in turn, gives the picture a transfixing poignancy. In its place appears the firm and scrupulous painting typical of Meissonier’s manner. Bodies, smocks, the lamp fixture, paving stones, a cap on the curbside: all are painted with the same evenhandedness, the same exertion of energy and attention. Such handling, however, has left everything rather flat, leveled; every object in the painting possesses the same basic signifying power. What matters is the collective effect, the singular unity and balance thus created. The result is not only a painting that exceeds the period’s expectations for finish—so much so that Gautier declared it “pitiless”— but also an image that seems colder, airless, and all the more horrifying and callous because of it.60 The undiscriminating care with which Meissonier crafted his image has led Hungerford to call the work an “unsettling dehumanization of the tragedy.”61 Indeed—yet the handling, which Salon critics unfailingly compared to the cold indifference of the daguerreotype, produces this effect not simply because these men are equated with the things of this pictured world and therefore deprived of “visual, and

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hence psychological, uniqueness” but because, and in so doing, it leaves the viewer searching for a “clear point of vantage.”62 Exacting craftsmanship need not always lead to a clear articulation of meaning. Degradation is often more than simply a matter of making the human base. With good reason Souvenir de guerre civile has over the years been called jewellike. Its forms and color have the hard, crisp precision of enamel work, which is complemented by the build-up of pigment in the areas where fabric folds and blood pools and by the painting’s highly polished surface. Meissonier lets this intensity of handling go as the street funnels back into its farthest reaches. The painting there is surprisingly nondescript, a blur of brown and gray and black, and appears even more so as the sharply delineated edges of the lamp fixture emerge from the expanse of viscous streaks. This is the Meissonier from the watercolor, where the fragility of painting’s hold on the world is set against his usually fastidious habits. In the oil, however, the background flattens out into a pictorial cul-de-sac, pushing the image, which grows increasingly stiff and lifeless, forward until it sits squarely in the foreground, in the area between the paving stones and the site whence they were dug up. A remnant of the watercolor, the loose styling of the background hints at a kind of sublimation, that something lies beneath the surface, and renders the jewellike foreground all the more perverse. Picked out with a crystalline clarity, the meticulously crafted detail of Meissonier’s picture, its miniature quality of handling and color, is at odds with its subject. It pulls us in, forces us to look closely—only, in the end, to refuse to make gore atrocious, to insist, instead, on its dreadful banality. Of Meissonier’s details, perhaps the most jewellike is the man whose body lies closest to the painting’s surface, face up, his legs splayed by the rubble beneath him (fig. 39). This is the man who underwent anatomical reconstruction between watercolor and oil. His head has been put back in place, his arm reattached (though a bloodied paving stone at his forearm recalls his former state of disrepair), his foot returned to full, if soiled, definition. Restored to bodily completeness, this man has evolved, nonetheless, into a vision even more harrowing than before. All signs of this rebel’s physiognomy have calcified; he shares the austere non-particularity of the street’s nameless storefronts. Such is the comprehensiveness Meissonier attributes to deaths of this kind. The tension in the insurgent’s hand, still clutching for the rifle it once held but of which it has since been despoiled, redoubles the effect, marks the progress and duration of rigor mortis. A rebel’s corpse and a paving stone really aren’t so different in the end. More unnerving still, however, is that Meissonier, while effacing the indications of this man’s identity, does not revert to the reductive tactics often employed by those of his class to characterize men like this: there is no obvious name-calling, no bestializations, no

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Fig. 39  Ernest Meissonier, detail of Souvenir de guerre civile (fig. 32). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

stereotyping. Meissonier appears to have been in search of some other way of understanding this man and, by extension, his compatriots. So Meissonier dressed the rebel in a blue smock and red pants, inserting between them the white flesh of his sinewy breast, his torso laid bare by the force of his backward fall over the barricade. Arrayed in this way, the man acquires the coloristic qualities and symbolism of the tricolor flag, now overrun, now stiff with sweat, dirt, and dried blood. He is, to be sure, a far cry from Delacroix’s Liberty (fig. 9), who holds the banner of the French state high, her breast similarly exposed, as she leads the revolution—woman and child, worker and bourgeois alike—over the barricade and into a future of her own making. For Delacroix’s verticality insert Meissonier’s horizontality—a “cadaverous horizontality,” according to Gautier63—and foreshortening, both of which, together, collapse the body and turn it in on itself. Gravity in Meissonier’s picture does not relent; each man has been pressured to take the shape of what lies beneath him. A measure of coherence and continuity, the tricolor is more than Meissonier’s insurgent can bear. He is a symbol of what falls apart in revolution rather than what comes together to build a new future—a symbol of obliteration, of what goes blank. Simply put, clothed in the tricolor, this man is at once the most

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meaningful and the most meaningless in the entire painting. In him presence and absence coincide. The June Days stripped the revolution of its veneer. “Some were stunned because their illusions were vanishing in a cloud of gunsmoke,” Marx observed; “others because they could not understand how the people could dare to come forward independently on behalf of its very own interests.”64 Listen, for instance, to the following exchange between General Bedeau and an unnamed chef de l’insurrection. The dispute, which bears the distinctive marks of a “struggle for recognition,” stalls on the question of “the people,” its representation, and thus the nature of its sovereignty: “General,” said the delegation’s leader . . . who, since morning, had commanded the insurrection in the Cité, “I come to order you to obey the people and National Guard of Paris. The people demands that the Hôtel de Ville be surrendered and the Assembly dissolved. What the people demands it will obtain by assent or by force. The army won’t delay in joining us. You can see that the republican guard deployed against us now stands behind [a passé derrière] our barricades, the people . . .”—“Monsieur,” the general interrupted in indignation, “I recognize only the people who elected the Constituent Assembly, none other. As for the army, it is loyal and dutiful and will soon prove it when it sweeps away your barricades!”65 Or this one, rather different in tone, between François Arago, president of the Executive Commission, and rebels, again unnamed, in the rue Soufflot: “Why are you revolting against the law?”—“We’ve already heard so many promises,” the workers reply, “and none of them have been kept. We no longer put our trust in words. It’s time for us to act!”—“But why build barricades?”—“We raised them together in 1832,” the insurgents reply, “don’t you remember the cloître Saint-Merry?”—“But Monsieur Arago,” one voice cries out, “why are you reproaching us, you’ve never been hungry, you don’t know what misery is!”66 The second dialogue, like the first, centers on questions of identity and mediation, the rights of “the people” and the determinations of law. “Down with the Assembly,” cries the insurgent people of the Cité. “The true people voted,” Bedeau replies. The rue Soufflot implores Arago, who, in 1832, remonstrated against the forcible repression of men fighting to win their freedom, to recall the convictions they hold in common: “Have

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you forgotten the cloître Saint-Merry?”67 Arago remains silent. “Mere words and broken promises, your law,” say the rebels; “if we acknowledge it, we accept our subjugation.” “You know nothing of real destitution,” a final voice interjects. To put the declension another way: the starkness of the first exchange, its flat declaration of disassociation sodden with the cynicism of feigned politeness—“Monsieur . . .”—becomes the pathos of the second, its sense of disillusion captured in a futile appeal to togetherness, the timbre of which turns tragic as the closing line acknowledges the limits of former alliances. In both cases, the substance of politics pivots on the degree and intensity of association, its authenticity or actuality; in both, the response comes back in the negative, with a final declaration of nonidentity. “You are not the people.” “You are not one of us.” Confident that law remains the only just form of mediation, Arago cannot recognize his contradiction; he asks the wrong question. Bedeau, accepting the “immeasurable chasm” that separates him from the man he confronts, asks none at all. Instead, he simply revokes, casting the rebel among the déclassés, the “scum.” The “optimistic humanism of the Enlightenment,” so affecting in February, had crystallized under the influence of the civil war into “the pessimism and misanthropy” of a class.68 In a celebrated passage from L’Idiot de la famille, Jean-Paul Sartre likens the “metamorphosis” to an awakening, a coming into self-awareness and the guilt that inevitably follows, a great Fall—banishment, so to speak, from the paradise of bourgeois innocence. “In June 1848,” he explains, “the veils were torn away: the bourgeoisie fulfilled the reality of its class by means of a crime; it sacrificed universality in order to define itself by its power relations with the other classes in a divided society.”69 Historical events obliged the bourgeoisie to reassess the implicit representation that oriented its self-understanding, that enabled it, in other words, to forget the foundational violence of its constitution. Having recognized its true self in its other, the bourgeoisie finally adhered to a different vision of the world. The crime to which Sartre refers, however, came later, after the battle, in the resentful slaughter of the vanquished—men who, en blouse, bore the mark of Cain. “These men were already dead,” Louis Ménard observed, “yet the blows kept coming.”70 The most notorious of the massacres occurred on the night of the twenty-sixth, when National Guards marched hundreds of rebels then incarcerated in the caveaux of the Tuileries to the place du Carrousel, knelt, and fired. “Friends,” they had assured their captives, “we’re taking you out for some air.”71 No one was fooled. At least fifty men died on the Carrousel that night, including a handful of National Guards who wandered across the line of fire. These numbers were relative: kindred incidents took place throughout Paris—in the caveaux themselves, where urine supplemented meager rations of bread and water, in the caves of the École Militaire and on the pelouse of the Champs de Mars, in the Luxembourg gardens and the cemetery of Montparnasse and the gypsum quarries of Montmartre, on the pont d’Arcole and against the barrière de ( 92 )  the revolution takes for m

Ménilmontant, in the homes and alleyways of the eastern quartiers. The violence exercised in the aftermath of the insurrection, during what Léonard Gallois called “the epilogue to the high drama [grand drame] of June,” was of a novel order.72 Murder had long been a convenient instrument of consolidating powers, but never had it been committed with such blatant self-disregard. “The Assembly cries ‘woe’ over the workers,” Marx wrote on the twenty-ninth, “in order to conceal that the ‘vanquished’ is none other than itself. Either it or the republic must now disappear. Hence its frantic howls of ‘long live the republic.’ ”73 The din of gunfire was drowned out; “no one dared to speak on behalf of the people.”74 An accurate body count does not exist. Once the smoke from the fusillades had dissipated, the slain were collected or tossed in the Seine, “the field of blood” effaced by layers of fresh sand.75 Fraternité, the great watchword of February, here found its “true, genuine, prosaic expression.”76 On the twenty-eighth, Proudhon recorded his dismay at the nature of the violence with a deadpan quality that complements the sardonic tone of Marx’s prognosis: This morning, June 28, they are performing executions at the Conciergerie, at the Hotel de Ville, 48 hours after the Victory. They are shooting wounded, unarmed prisoners. They cast the most appalling aspersions on the insurgents in order to excite vengeance against them. They are arresting citizens suspected of communism at their homes. Above all they are interested in the combatants of February; they bring them to the pont d’Arcole and, once there, shoot them and throw them in the water. They have besotted the Mobile Guards and have unleashed them on the insurgents like bulldogs, brothers against brothers, a new Thebaid . . . Horror! . . . Horror! . . . They were returning prisoners from the Faubourg on the recommendation of officers who advised clemency, but, upon arriving at the Hôtel de Ville, they shot them and threw them in the river.77 We might not expect such restraint from Proudhon, even in his carnets. It would seem as though, for him, reticence and expressiveness had for the moment become correlatives, as though genuine horror—the kind that defies speech, that draws little consolation from exclamation points—could only be captured in monotone. To be clear, I wish neither to dismiss nor devalue the heightened pitch of his interjection (“Horreur! . . . Horreur!”); the interruption has its own eloquence. Amid the matter-of-fact detailing of the passages before and after it, however, it seems to me to hit a slightly false note. The poignancy of Proudhon’s account, the affect of its prose, lies in the dryness of its a monstrous pile of men and stone  ( 93 )

handling, in the sense of bathos its restraint makes palpable, in the repetition of the indefinite subject “on” and the way it seems to reinforce the plainness of Proudhon’s language even as the implicitness of the pronoun—its caution—risks passivity. Not that the lack of a concrete referent dulls any edges or confuses the orientation of the crime. Indeed, amid a description of pervasive, ongoing terror, the nonspecificity of “on” takes on a singular potency. It reproduces the unexceptional character of the tragedy, the true pessimism and misanthropy of the deed. These Mobile Guards, men who typically shared the class identity of those they led to the slaughter, had been demonstrating a monstrous blindness to the machinations of class power—of this Proudhon was sure. Brothers truly were killing brothers, in other words, and they did so ferociously, swept up in a fog of ressentiment their masters proved too eager to nurture. Blanqui concurred: “Fraternity today! A hypocrisy, a trap, a dagger! The fraternity of Cain!—The Inquisition said ‘my brother!’ to its victim on the chevalet. The word ‘fraternity’ will soon be spoken with the same sarcasm as the phrase ‘for the love of God!’ This motto of divine charity has become the supreme irony of egoism and indifference.”78 As did Joseph Déjacque, who sharpened the retort, gave it an explosive concision: “Fraternity is fratricide.” “Yes,” his chanson de juin concludes, Fraternity is but a sham When misery and gold are joined together. Since when does one open the sheepfold to the wolf ? Soon, poor sheep, you will be strangled! Ah! for as long as strict equality in our laws Does not embody solidarity. The flanks of fraternity Will beget fratricide!79 Dangerous words, these: Déjacque, like Blanqui, spent most of the Second Republic in lockup or in exile. He fought with the rebels in June, backed Ledru-Rollin’s abortive coup d’état on June 13, 1849, and, two years later, excited contempt for the government and hatred between citizens with a small collection of poems titled Les Lazaréennes (1851). The catastrophe of the final act exposed the myth of formal democracy by bearing out the violence of its central contradiction. On this point Blanqui was as insistent as Déjacque: “Fraternity is the impossibility of killing one’s brother.”80 For Blanqui, there was no going back; the June Days universalized the “struggle for life.”81 Thus deprived of self-sufficiency—that is, of a place in human nature—fraternity revealed itself to have been no more than a construct of language and reason, a distorting mirror no

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longer capable of refracting the “hypocrisy of passions” it reproduced.82 “Man is a wolf to man,” Blanqui concluded.83 The same irremediable fallacy drove the liberal’s march toward equality, the utopian’s counterfactual universe, and the romance of the socialist who believed fraternity would occur spontaneously: the one, like the others, denied what was in order to explain what was not. Henceforth, invocations of fraternity required qualification. With bitterness and disillusion, one began to speak of la fraternité ouvrière, la fraternité socialiste, la fraternité bourgeoise, and so on.84 Seen from this angle, Meissonier’s omelette d’hommes seems all the more astonishing, all the more unlikely to have appeared in 1850, never mind 1849. “What is this really a picture of ?” Édouard Thierry protested in indignation. Ever since there have been painters, they have depicted death; only they have made it resemble sleep. The man who no longer lives closes his eyes and sleeps, never again to awaken. Meissonier has rendered death such as it is, sinister death, which terrifies life; death with open eyes that no longer see; death which watches over living form, ironizes it, shows it no longer capable of movement, no longer in possession of a will, instinct, or even the bearing and tranquility of the human creature. Lest anything be missed in this spectacle which revolts the senses, this death’s head is ever more abominable. It is more than death, it is death in misery, death in rags, death in suffering and degradation; death . . . not battle, not even the terrible and savage expression of rage in combat. Nothing but death and massacre.85 Thierry expected absolution. Instead, he saw the carrion of a hecatomb without consequence, the banality of killing and dying, Death the Taunter. He saw men shaped by the conditions of their class rather than plunderers justly condemned for their audacity. In short, he saw the carnage of the Carrousel on June 26. He goes on: “Where are the weapons these men bore? No sabers, no guns, not even a stick. . . . Nothing but corpses, nothing but smocks riddled with holes and stained with blood on a demolished barricade. Not one bloodied uniform in the street, not a single epaulet—the gold epaulet, say, of one of the six generals killed by the insurrection, killed by the bullets of the riot!” Not only were these omissions, this shameless implication of effects without cause, detestable. They were pernicious, for they legitimated these rebels as victims— who guns down the unarmed?—and therefore undermined the painting’s presumed intention and ideological prerogative. “One does not counsel peace by insulting the vanquishers and speaking in anger to the vanquished. One does not persuade another of the horrors of civil war by calling for vengeance.” By giving these rebels the

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appearance of passivity, drawn “always” from “the same sentiment for the real,” Meissonier had, or so Thierry imagined, falsified the reason for their subjugation, made it look criminal. “An unfortunate accusation—almost a slander. Meissonier has been ill-advised.”86 Vengeance for vengeance: this is the bad faith of Sartre’s hating-hateful-man whipped up into alarmist fantasy. Which is not to say that Thierry’s view of Meissonier’s death’s-head depiction of death is mere projection. Much as Thierry wants heroes and villains—Cavaignac’s vainqueurs and vaincus—he cannot help but admit that the pitiful abjection of the rebels is part of the truth or get away from a knowledge of the achievement involved in Meissonier’s way of capturing it. Thierry’s description of what death looks like in the picture indeed seems to me powerful and apt—stunningly, atrociously so. It points toward the constitutive quality of the painting: the pervasive feeling in it of history being absent, replaced by mere messy materiality. Méry, writing in the Legitimist La Mode, put it this way: The painter has set down a narrow street in Paris, a genuine rue d’insurrection. Windows and shops are closed; not a single living being can be found, not even the dog of Vigneron’s Convoi du pauvre. Yet corpses abound; it’s a hash of human flesh. A hail of bullets has passed through this street; nothing remains standing; the reaping is done. Never has a rebellion been more effectively cut down; it’s a masterpiece of civil destruction. Only Paris knows how to work so hard while it accomplishes nothing! That’s what we do periodically; it’s our habit. And what do we gain from this deplorable game? We end up with the same ministers we have chased out, the same men we have cursed, the same laws we have torn up, the same crises we have already faced. We always replace the present with the past. This is nothing more than another chapter to add to the martyrology of the barricades of Paris.87 François Sabatier-Ungher, the Fourierist critic for La Démocratie pacifique, discerned the same arresting quality, the same measure of impotence, only he turned the action outward, toward the viewer courageous enough to look “jusqu’au bout.” He found its revelations cruel, but not like Thierry, whose dyspepsia he transposed into a tragic key: “Oh impious battle in which no one can claim glory for being victorious, those who fear violent emotions will turn their eyes from you! And they will be right. But no, let’s not turn our eyes away, there are lessons here for everyone. Violence begets liberty no more than it preserves order; it breeds death, that’s all. What’s most cruel about this painting is that, because of indecision and lack of effect, we are obliged to look at it for a long time, detail by detail.”88 Souvenir de guerre civile, he maintained, evinced a

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sang-froid that was “more significant” than any message or warning it might convey. Its eloquence was its indifference, the “horrible naïveté” with which it presented “this human hecatomb.” Martyrologe applied no more to this tuerie than chef-d’œuvre. Meissonier’s painting does not have to declare its allegiances out loud; it does not have to condemn one side or valorize the other. It has no need of definitive terms. Nor must it banish the rebels from sight. It is enough that they have been reduced to position and arrangement, that men have been replaced by matter, background by foreground, figure by ground. Here are the “facts” of the civil war; here is “history.” This, it seems to me, is what Meissonier’s scrupulous painting—his “horrible naïveté”—is all about, and this is what Meissonier’s petrified reconstruction of the scene—and the watercolor—reaffirms. The achievement of Souvenir de guerre civile lies in the vividness and accuracy of its description, in their deadliness. The painting obliges us to look closely and at length, “detail by detail.” Yet looking offers no release; it softens nothing. The painting is “microscopic,”89 but it does not magnify. Detailedness leads to impasse. Souvenir de guerre civile remains immovable throughout; it “captures the silence that follows every act of annihilation.”90 Somewhere here, in the deadlock created, resides the painting’s (and Meissonier’s) true pessimism. Or maybe, instead, I should say dispassion. At least that was how Meissonier’s critics described what they saw. And I might, with Alfred Dauger, call that dispassion scientific: “an extreme perfection of details,” which “reveals to us—coldly, mathematically, with a scrupulousness entirely anatomical and surgical—the horrors and terrors of a struggle we’d wish to forget, and this on an infinitely small scale.”91 Or even, like Louis Peisse, technological: “this horrible ensemble of details—local, individual, and specific—can’t be made up. All of this existed materially, in this street, on this barricade, on a particular day and at a given hour. The artist saw it with his own eyes and, overcome by this tragic image, attached it to a canvas with the pitiless fidelity of the daguerreotype.” What is a cadaver after all, Peisse says, if not “the semblance of human form,” “an inert mass,” “a kind of mannequin of flesh and bone” devoid of “physiological and physiognomic significance”?92 Yet Meissonier’s attentiveness in spite of horror, which Peisse could grasp only by likening it to a mechanical process—an image seized and “attached” to a substrate—spoke of more than just an adherence to hard facts, more than just a conformity to what was already there: it accounted, Peisse believed, for the painting’s stubborn refusal to coalesce, its disaggregation, that is, into so many fragments, no one detail carrying more weight than any another—indeed, each possessing its own autonomy. Death-dealing, grim even-weightedness was, for Peisse, the distinctive quality of the painting, at once its fidelity and its pitilessness, the inhuman character of its camera-like neutrality and the work of decomposition it turned out.

a monstrous pile of men and stone  ( 97 )

Peisse gets this right, I think. In his own way, so does Thierry. The proletarian appears in Meissonier’s painting. He has been arrayed in blue, white, and red. Lamartine once argued that France and the tricolor “form[ed] but a single thought.”93 Souvenir de guerre civile manages to contradict this fiction, jam its codes. The horizontality of “the people” shown—their lowness, their indiscriminate mixing with each other, their association with a revealed ground level (indeed, dug up)—moves them into another social space.

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•4 Between Past and Future He has two antagonists: The first pushes him from behind, from his origin [Ursprung]. The second blocks the road in front of him. He struggles with both. Actually the first supports him in his struggle with the second, for the first wants to push him forward; and in the same way the second supports him in his struggle with the first; for the second of course is trying to force him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two protagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? However that may be, he has a dream that some time in an unguarded moment—it would require too, one must admit, a night darker than any night has ever been yet—he will spring out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience of such warfare, as judge over his struggling antagonists. —Franz Kafka, “He: Notes from the Year 1920,” 1920 If I make it through, I know I’ll have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently push far from me (not repress) my treasure, guide myself back to the principle of the most indigent behavior as in the time when I was looking for myself without achieving prowess, in a naked dissatisfaction, a scarcely glimpsed knowledge, and a questioning humility. —René Char, Feuillets d’Hypnos, 1943–44

I

n the first (and penultimate) issue of Le Salut public, Baudelaire described the February Revolution of 1848 as if describing a work of art. “For three days now,” he recalled from the twenty-seventh, “the population of Paris has been a vision of physical beauty. . . . Countenances have gleamed with enthusiasm and republican pride. They wanted, the scum, to make over the bourgeoisie in their image—all stomach and guts—while the People groaned in hunger. People and bourgeoisie have shaken the body of France free of this corrupt and immoral vermin! If you want to see beautiful men, men six feet tall, come to France! A free man, whoever he may be, is more beautiful than marble.”1

It is hardly surprising that Baudelaire, amid the festival atmosphere of late February, turned to the language of aesthetics. After all, this was the language he knew best, and no doubt it came to him more or less instinctively. The unity he expected it to evoke is, however, another matter. Not unlike Michelet eighteen years earlier, Baudelaire was confident that he had just borne witness to the fulfillment of the revolution and hence of history, the final victory, as it were, of human freedom over fatality. Incited by the call of Le Droit, “the people,” he believed, had risen from the earth like a géant and, on the barricade, assumed its role as the New Colossus. And it was for Baudelaire, as it had been for Michelet, the emergence of “the people” as historical agent that made the revolution a reality. “People! There you are, now and forever.”2 Mediating categories had dropped off entirely: on the twenty-third, or so Baudelaire thought at the time, art and politics—art and life—coincided. The sight was resplendent, the correspondance it bespoke intoxicating. Fata morgana. The election campaign turned Baudelaire into an opponent of February.3 France had become infested yet again, only now, instead of ravenous and hypocritical “vermin,” with so many blustering half-wits, républicains du lendemain who, incapable of reconciling thought and experience, took shelter beneath faddish catchphrases and sterile promises of everything. Baudelaire dubbed them the “entrepreneurs of public happiness.”4 The all-but-certain victory of these aspiring functionaries in the April elections dispelled the “lyrical illusion” with which Baudelaire had come to associate the revolution and that had until then clouded his judgment.5 What remained in evidence was an alliance of democratic and bourgeois interests Baudelaire had not wished to see before.6 He would go on to write in defense of the May 15 invasion and its perpetrators, whose “taste for destruction” he identified with the condition of fallen humanity. “Legitimate taste,” he concluded, “if everything that is natural is legitimate.”7 In June, Baudelaire sided with the rebellion, as he did again, a few years later, on December 2, 1851. But this time, as Louis-Napoléon’s henchmen made their rounds, “the people” chose not to put up a fight. Quite the opposite, in fact: at the plebiscite of December 21, “the people,” whose right to vote had just been restored, endorsed the coup d’état by an overwhelming majority and thereby “democratically” legitimated Louis-Napoléon’s seizure of power.8 The Seraphim of the Enlightenment had revealed their other, dark side: political rights, les droits du citoyen, and natural rights, les droits de l’homme, now existed in open contradiction. Outraged by the display of collective complicity, Baudelaire succumbed at last to political disillusionment. On March 5, shortly after the pro forma election of 1852 restocked the National Assembly with Bonapartist yes-men, Baudelaire wrote to Narcisse Ancelle to explain: “You didn’t see me at the polls; I’m resolved in this. December 2nd physically depoliticized me. There are no more generally held ideas. That the whole of Paris is Orléanist is indisputable, but that doesn’t concern me. If I had voted, I could only have voted for ( 100 )  the revolution takes for m

myself.”9 He offered his friend Auguste Poulet-Malassis a comparable set of justifications in a letter of March 20. Yet there, in the second letter, Baudelaire thought to activate his estrangement, turn disenfranchisement into something of an intention, an act of autocensure, a means of exorcism: “I’d really prefer to see only two parties, face to face, and I hate this pedantic and hypocritical center which threw me in jail and gave me nothing but dry bread to eat. All that amuses me greatly. But I have decided henceforth to steer clear of all human polemics and am more decided than ever to pursue the superior dream of applying metaphysics to the novel.”10 The shift, though subtle, gives Baudelaire’s withdrawal from the public sphere an iconoclastic bite, his disavowal a destructive character. Baudelaire cuts through the myth of a politics he formerly embraced—a politics of “the people,” of popular sovereignty and collective action, which is to say, a politics that aligns presence with reality, revolution with the “natural pleasure of demolition”—by means of autodénunciation.11 Rather than liquidate the revolution’s symbolic legacy and, a fortiori, its claim to represent the contemporary political body, the 1851 coup d’état and the plebiscite that followed signaled its reenchantment. The renewed faith of “the people” in the power of republican institutions—and universal suffrage was the republican institution par excellence—made it an unwitting accomplice to its own subjugation. Twice more did “the people” repeat this Lenten ritual: first on November 21, when it authorized the prince-president to extend his mandate, and then again, on December 10, when it endorsed the return to Empire. Baudelaire summed up his rage at the inveterate torpor and passivity of his compatriots in Mon cœur mis à nu: In the eyes of history and the French people, Napoléon III’s achievement will have been that he showed how anyone, so long as he gets hold of the telegraph and the printing press, can govern a great nation. Those who believe such things can be accomplished without the people’s permission are imbeciles—and so are those who believe that fame can be founded only on virtue. Dictators are the people’s domestics—nothing more, and it’s a lousy role, by the way—and fame is the result of the adaptation of mind to the nation’s stupidity.12 For Baudelaire, as Debarati Sanyal has suggested, the perversion of participatory democracy into a consensual act of self-abnegation doomed the possibility of an active and communal political practice, establishing in its place a paradoxical world in which neither dictator nor subject was an agent. In effect, the two blindly colluded in the production and perpetuation of mass delusion: “la sottise nationale.”13 The fog of spectacle had eclipsed politics, or to be more precise, it had technologized and therefore between past and future  ( 101 )

dehumanized politics, veiling present realities with the beguiling illusion of democratic consensus. Here was the new system of representation, the new image of fraternity and social harmony, and it turned on the convergence of “dictator” and “domestic.” Thus the Ideal—the Colossus—turns to pitch. Supplement the lines above with these, also from Mon cœur mis à nu: “To be a useful man has always seemed to me something quite hideous. / 1848 was amusing only because everyone made utopias, like castles in Spain. / 1848 was charming only by virtue of the very excess of its absurdity.” Or this one: “In every change there is something at once vile and agreeable, some combination of disloyalty and restive moving about. This suffices to explain the French revolution.” Or better still, these, which frame the others: “The Revolution and the cult of Reason prove the idea of sacrifice. / Superstition is the reservoir of all truths. . . . The Revolution, through sacrifice, affirms superstition.”14 I do not wish to overburden these declarations; they are clearly fragmentary, sharply pointed yet elliptical fusées launched, from the mid-1850s, at a triumphant bourgeoisie. Their tone, nonetheless, is remarkably sober—full of bitterness, to be sure, but smelling not so much of resentment or bad faith as of spleen and “unhappy consciousness.” I find it hard not to be struck by the image of revolution that emerges from them, how it turns predestined failure to use. Defiantly anti-utopian, resolutely opposed to popular notions of progress—“civilized man,” Baudelaire writes elsewhere, “invents the philosophy of progress to console himself for his abdication and his degeneration”—the fusées work to salvage revolution by striking at its roots.15 “When I consent to being republican,” Baudelaire later declaimed, “I know I’m doing something evil. Yes! Long Live the Revolution! Always! I mean it (quand même)! But I am no fool—I’ve never been a fool! I say ‘Long Live the Revolution!’ as if I were saying ‘Long Live Destruction! Long Live Expiation! Long Live Retribution! Long Live Death!’ ”16 These passages from Mon cœur mis à nu replace the assimilation of revolutionary and natural destruction with a Sisyphean delusion, a mirror image of the terrestrial paradise: “supremacy of the pure idea for the Christian as for the Babouvist communist.”17 Allied with the cult of reason, which merely redresses the occultism it claims to negate, revolution turns out to be just another kind of irrationalism, and the act of sacrifice performed in its name, whose bloodletting purges iniquitous institutions only to allow the erstwhile content of superstition to flourish, takes on the quality of a ritual offering: the new life it promises to create must be taken on faith.18 Yet reason, like the deity whose authority it usurps, is insatiable. The old power proves inescapable. It merely shifts its shape, taking its revenge by colonizing the new forms that society produces: in place of God and King, the technocratic State, le quotidien bourgeois, and the banalization of violence. “Every revolution has for a corollary the massacre of innocents.”19 Born of the Enlightenment, the revolution fulfills its reality by reverting to myth, cloaking the catastrophe it engenders—the self-sufficiency of instrumental reason, ( 102 )  the revolution takes for m

the phantasmagoria of happiness, the quietus of paradis artificiels—with the mystique of progress. Its truth resides in its fetishistic character. Nowhere does Baudelaire stage the agony of the Second Republic more keenly or with greater self-awareness than in “Le Gâteau,” a prose poem of 1862. The poem turns on its conclusion, a wry perversion of la beauté du peuple: “So there exists a superb land where bread is called cake, a confection so rare that it suffices to beget a perfectly fratricidal war!”20 Uttered in sadness, these words form the melancholy refrain with which the poem’s narrator, a promeneur solitaire brutally returned to the sordid world of men, submits to final disillusionment. Only moments earlier, this promeneur, his thoughts fluttering with a “lightness equal to that of the atmosphere,” believed he had taken leave of “vulgar passions”—of hatred and profane love—and had, in fact, found “perfect peace” with himself and with the universe in the “irresistible nobility” of an idyllic landscape. So enchanting was this communion that, surrendering to Rousseauvian reverie, he even began to reflect on the natural goodness of man: “in my perfect beatitude and in total forgetfulness of all earthly evil, I reached the point where I no longer found so ridiculous the newspapers which claim that man is born good.” No doubt Le Salut public and the adoring journalist Baudelaire had been figured among these purveyors of unfulfilled wish-images. The narrator’s ascension to the heights of beatific innocence, token of a redeemed correspondence between the human spirit and the natural world, lasts less than a page. Out of compassion he has offered a piece of bread to a starving gamin, which, to his horror, precipitates a harrowing battle between the “little savage” and his covetous twin, the two children ferociously tearing at one another until the scandalous prize—seized now by “the usurper,” now by its “legitimate owner”— disintegrates, the crumbs scattered like the grains of sand into which it vanishes. Abrupt and jarring is this wayfarer’s sobering-up, his fall from happiness, his homecoming. Weighed down by the darkness that has begun to envelop the landscape, the “calm joy” that delighted his soul having “completely disappeared,” he repeats his splenetic refrain “endlessly.” The whole substance of politics in the late 1840s and early 1850s inheres in these words of frustrated desire—in the illusion of happiness and goodness and its constant defeat in the face of barbaric humanity, in the misrecognition of bread for cake and the dispersive properties of sand, in the corruption of the Edenic correspondence and the broken link between thought and action, art and life. “Il n’y a plus d’idées générales”: so said Baudelaire ten years before “Le Gâteau,” on the eve of Empire. He was describing for Ancelle the physical effect of depoliticization, the splintering that accompanied the onset of anomie, or what Michelet, in a lecture of January 13, 1848, called the “dangers of the dispersal of mind.”21 Before the coup d’état, it looked as though the countryside might side with the Left in the coming elections for both the National Assembly and between past and future  ( 103 )

the president. The République démocratique et sociale appeared once again just over the horizon. “My fury at the coup d’état. How many bullets I exposed myself to! Another Bonaparte! What a disgrace! And yet everyone is pacified.”22 It seems Baudelaire knew little of the revolts in the south and southeast. No matter: by March all was quiet; votes had been cast. This was Baudelaire’s night to jump out of the fighting line. The future, he reckoned, belonged to the déclassés.23 My account of Baudelaire’s descent into despair and disillusion is meant as prologue, to raise a set of questions about the state of politics between June 1848 and December 1851 and thus to highlight the gap between past and future, an interval in time that, Arendt says, is “altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things that are not yet.”24 For it is there, on the broken middle ground, when everything is at risk, that we ought to place Daumier’s L’Émeute (fig. 40). The standpoint is one of disillusion, yet not entirely—not strictly—as Baudelaire experienced it. Daumier does not imagine a viewpoint from above. With L’Émeute, Daumier stages the failure of the revolution, but he does so—L’Émeute does so—tragically, and with none of the melodrama that makes Baudelaire an irresistible point of reference, even identification. The vantage L’Émeute takes up renders its drama unresponsive. It is tugged and shaped by indecision. Yet L’Émeute works against this doubt; it does not think of repressing it. L’Émeute bears the burden of February, and a simple charting of its themes and iconography is sufficient to demonstrate how voluntary the acceptance was. In it, a blond ouvrier in white smock leads an insurgent crowd, his arm raised in defiance, a battle cry on his parted lips. Another worker, in chapeau melon, marches at his right, his abstracted features cast in shadow; a bourgeois, almost indiscernible except for the distinctive shape of his haut-de-forme, fills out the front line. A second bourgeois, similarly appointed, rises above the multitude from one row in. His deportment, though indicated only by the tilt of his head and the few black smudges that mark out his visage, appears strangely in sync with the crowd’s homme de tête. Together these men, blouse and habit, press forward in a single rhythm; women and children, no more precisely detailed than the rest, figure prominently among their immeasurable ranks. Neither blood nor the smoke of gunfire darkens the protest, clouds the outcome, or challenges its necessity. The barricade is suggested but absent. Destruction and death— the inescapable effects of revolutionary violence—remain unseen. These émeutiers are on the move, their actions spontaneous; they do not carry guns in their hands. The antagonism driving the rebellion, instead, has been consolidated in a single gesture, one voice and one motion. It is the conviction of the crowd—its solemnity and attentiveness, its compactness—rather than its anger that seems to matter. This is revolution without a “them.” ( 104 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 40  Honoré Daumier, L’Émeute, ca. 1848–52. Oil on canvas, 87.63 × 113.03 cm. The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Photo: The Phillips Collection.

The indeterminable size and density of the crowd, which the flat rectangle opposite the raised fist of its guide reinforces, affirm the sense of all-overness and coherence that provides the uprising with the substantiality of Right. The built environment gives the mass a shape, locates it, but does not curb its spread, does not designate a limiting condition. We do not see the street. This is the city as envisioned by the caricaturist, the continuousness and homogeneity of its architecture the result of simplification and synthesis. It does not assert its own implacable permanence—the dreary, deadly absoluteness of its detail—over and against the vitality of those fighting for a right to it, fighting, that is, to remake the city and hence to remake themselves.25 The flat rectangle, parallel to the planar surface it draws into the picture, poses little challenge to the diagonal of the raised fist, which directs the charge, at an angle, toward that surface and its frame, both of them seemingly incapable of containing its magnitude and force, of enclosing or excluding it. Once more we can invoke “the people”—as nation, as la grande famille française. Once more we can call the revolution beautiful, speak of géants and colossi, imagine a future in which words like completion, reconciliation, and wholeness express a reality rather than a desideratum. Yet we would be doing so—Daumier asks us to do so—after June. We do not know when, precisely, Daumier painted L’Émeute. Proposals, whether based on stylistic or thematic grounds, have ranged widely: 1848 or 1849, the early to mid to late 1850s, even 1871.26 Seeking the middle road, Bruce Laughton splits the date in two: 1848 with later interventions in the 1850s.27 The debate is a peculiar one to have about an artist like Daumier, so much of whose graphic work proceeded in lockstep with the day-to-day rhythm of “the news.” Quibbling over dates lands us in foreign territory, maybe even dangerous territory, and surely political territory.28 It distances Daumier’s work from the instability and contingency of the everyday; it introduces the universal; it pits Daumier the painter against Daumier the lithographer, art against politics; it splits Daumier’s imagery in two. Such debates are nevertheless unavoidable with his paintings, however freighted the exercise may be. More often than not Daumier left his paintings dateless, and he seldom exhibited them. Commissioned work was never his custom. (The two commissions Jeanron secured for him in 1848 and 1849, La Madeleine au desert and Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, were exceptions, responses to economic exigency and the shifting conditions of artistic production.) Moreover, Daumier regularly struggled to finish his paintings, so much so that habitual nondelivery and procrastination became tropes circulated among friends and biographers; a majority of his paintings, whatever their state of completion, remained unknown until Durand-Ruel hosted a retrospective of Daumier’s œuvre in 1878. L’Émeute did not figure among the ninety-four paintings put on view. An esquisse—at least this, with its implied lack of finish serving as explanation, is what the painting is generally ( 106 )  the revolution takes for m

considered—L’Émeute traveled from one attic to another until Arsène Alexandre, Daumier’s first biographer, rediscovered it in 1924. Uncertainty over L’Émeute’s date of manufacture—both its taking-up and its abandonment—has engendered considerable reluctance over the years to think through the relation of its image to history. Few doubt that the picture addresses the Revolution of 1848, yet even fewer push beyond the usual generalities and proceed to speak in specific terms about how it interacts with this history, whose distinctive qualities are confusion and ambiguity. These are not qualities L’Émeute is typically believed to evince. The more substantial impediment, however, has been the painting’s condition. Ever since its reemergence in 1924, connoisseurs and scholars by and large have accepted—presumed, really—that most, if not all, of the painting’s top layer of pigment is the handiwork of someone else. K. E. Maison, when he published his catalogue raisonné of Daumier’s œuvre in 1968, stated the point unequivocally: no serious student of Daumier’s paintings, he maintains, could mistake the heads of L’Émeute’s principal figures for “authentic originals.”29 He relegates L’Émeute, which he leaves undated, to a group of paintings attributed to Daumier that, whether overzealously restored or completed by forgers, no longer evidence Daumier’s autograph “touch.” Only the “conception of its . . . composition” can be considered Daumier’s, he insists; the revisions of another’s hand—“though in this case a very able one”—are decisive, obvious “even in a photograph.” No documents from the period confirm Maison’s claims one way or the other; we know next to nothing of the painting’s whereabouts between 1879, the year Daumier died, and 1924. Against Maison, however, or at least against his confidence, we can position the treatment report conducted by The Phillips Collection in 1999, which suggests that the painting—both the chemical compounds of its pigments and its brushwork—is consistent throughout.30 Touch, style, and quality: these seem to me inadequate criteria for assessing the authenticity of L’Émeute, regardless. At best, they are provisional; at worst, they belie the mystifying notion of artistic consistency that cloaks them with an air of conclusiveness. In the late 1840s, Daumier was relatively new to painting; he was new to color and oil and brushes; he was new to the pliancy of stretched canvas; he was new to painting’s scale (L’Émeute measures 87.6 by 113 centimeters). The late 1840s and early 1850s were a testing period for Daumier, a time of exploration and discovery, trial and error. That the handful of paintings he executed before 1848 are small in scale and on panel, the firmness and absorbency of which more closely approximate stone, therefore comes as nothing of a surprise. Daumier was learning how to paint; he was learning how to manipulate a different set of materials, an unfamiliar set of means. Little, perhaps, speaks more directly to the experimental and tentative quality of L’Émeute than Daumier’s use of a damaged secondhand canvas, a portrait he likely bought on the cheap and turned on its side—hence the painting’s unusual dimensions. The surface between past and future  ( 107 )

irregularities of the painting beneath L’Émeute show through like pentimenti, altering its texture and the density of its pigmentation. Daumier did not know how or did not care to repair the compromised substrate. Either way, the foreseeable appearance of bumps, ridges, and shadow images did not deter him. Then there is his recourse to old habits when new ones failed: the outlines of the figures and the cityscape they traverse have been drawn in with lithographic crayon. Confidence in one medium had yet to become confidence in the other. We cannot expect consistency from Daumier’s early paintings, nor should we judge the quality of their execution by measuring them against pictures we prize for being “authentic originals.” Painting, for Daumier, was still an untried practice; he did not have a coherent style. He could paint Ouvriers dans la rue (ca. 1846–48), which looks astonishingly like L’Émeute, and Le Meunier, son fils et l’âne (1849), which looks nothing like it (although it does share L’Émeute’s distinctive gesture), roughly at the same time (figs. 41–42). Maison, Laughton, and the others who have puzzled over connoisseurial questions nevertheless have a point. They are right, I think, to see L’Émeute as a layered painting, a concretion of starts and stops, work and erasure and rework, some done at one time, some done at another. This is not to say that each layer corrects the one preceding it. They are cumulative, to be sure, measures taken to differentiate one figure from the next and to secure the negativity of the painting’s ground, but they also have an iterative quality, each step groping repeatedly for the same elusive presence. Blocks and shapes of color, then black lines, then gray shadowing and charcoal hatching, then patches of white or yellow highlighting have been laid down in episodic stages. Each stage is related, but none of them has been translated into modeling. The layers of L’Émeute never coalesce into unified form. Indeed, Daumier’s émeutiers appear rather flat. Nor is it to say that L’Émeute ought to be read like a palimpsest, unless we call on this term, and the textual practice it describes, to clarify the relationship between the portrait and the picture Daumier has painted over it. In this regard, L’Émeute does operate like a palimpsest: it is a portrait of an unknown man from the eighteenth or nineteenth century rotated ninety degrees and overlaid by an image of rebellion; the many replace the individual, “the people” supplants the bourgeois. Effacement and reinscription alone, however, do not establish L’Émeute as a palimpsest. What matters, ultimately, is the extent to which this procedure—these repeated acts of transfiguration—recalls L’Émeute’s former condition. Daumier’s painting shoulders the determinations of the history it mediates, the weight and violence of culture and representation. It turns, dialectically, on visibility and elision, and it internalizes that contradiction, realizes it as struggle. Yet unlike palimpsests, L’Émeute—the construction of its image, the layers produced and repeated in the process of its making—looks backward rather than forward, toward the past rather than the future. It does not work to fix things. ( 108 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 41  Honoré Daumier, Ouvriers dans la rue, ca. 1846–48. Oil on panel, 12.4 × 17 cm. National Museum Cardiff. Photo © National Museum of Wales.

Fig.  42  Honoré Daumier, Le Meunier, son fils et l’âne, 1849. Oil on panel, 130 × 97 cm. Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow. Photo © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums and Libraries Collections.

L’Émeute is citational more than it is palimpsestic. Walter Benjamin explains: “Citation summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously, in the structure of a new text. As rhyme, it gathers the similar into its aura; as name, its stands alone and expressionless.”31 In Benjamin’s telling, citation performs a double action: it both “saves and punishes.” Wrenched out of context, the cited word sheds the need to communicate beyond itself. For the moment, it returns to its primordial expressionlessness. The “original sin” of language and its subsequent fall into semiosis have been suspended. For Benjamin, citation comports itself mimetically. When entered into a new (con)text, the word reappears as if a caesura, an interruption that yields completion.32 Semblance and truth—origin and destruction—are united. Citation thereby proves the “matrix of justice.”33 1848 was a year of readjustments for Daumier. The Second Republic, which abolished restrictions on the press, enabled him to return to political caricature. At first, Daumier availed himself of his restored freedoms. Between March 4 and 9 he published, in sequence, Le Gamin de Paris aux Tuileries, Tout est perdu! fors la caisse, and Dernier conseil des ex-ministres (figs. 43–45), three lithographs that, together, celebrate the triumphant return of Delacroix’s Liberty—“she alone,” Michelet said of her reappearance, “is at home in France”—and the exile of her bourgeois form.34 Subscribers to Le Charivari could not have missed the common point of reference; the recycled poses and gestures were unmistakable, meaningful, by 1848, in and of themselves. The revolution’s victory and its largely unimpeded evolution into a republic nevertheless presented caricaturists with a peculiar dilemma: it pressed them, at least those working left of center, to reevaluate their trade. The shared language of forms and symbols that had previously given political caricature its ideological coherence and distinctive force ceased to be valid. Political lines were being redrawn. What to oppose and how to oppose it—or was it, rather, what to extol and how to defend it?—had become uncertain. When Daumier was asked for additional pictures of the deposed king, he therefore declined: they would be pointless, he explained, out of sync with the present order of things.35 He had to get to know new enemies; he had to figure out who they were; he had to see what they looked like, what a republic that was also an enemy looked like. Not by accident, then, did Daumier refrain for most of 1848 from taking on the personalities of the new government (this forbearance came to an end when, in December, Eugène Cavaignac, “the butcher of June,” faced off against Louis-Napoléon, le neveu, for the presidency). Most of his lithographs from that year—the suitably hyperbolic Les Alarmistes et les alarmés, for instance, or the anti-feminist Les Divorceuses or the unpublished Ouvrier et Bourgeois—came at politics indirectly, or rather, pictured ( 110 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 43  Honoré Daumier, Le Gamin de Paris aux Tuileries (DR 1743). Lithograph, 25.5 × 22.5 cm. Le Charivari, March 4, 1848. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF. Fig. 44  Honoré Daumier, Tout est perdu! fors la caisse (DR 1744). Lithograph, 22.3 × 27 cm. Le Charivari, March 7, 1848. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF. Fig. 45  Honoré Daumier, Dernier conseil des ex-ministres (DR 1746). Lithograph, 21.6 × 26.9 cm. Le Charivari, March 9, 1848. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

politics differently, as a matter of performance and affect, the lineaments of class and gender difference, and the eroding boundary between private and public life. A decade of censorship had taught Daumier a great deal about the relationship between politics and le quotidien; it had taught him to look for the everyday detail and to see in it the true measure and expression of the dominant form of life. For the time being, however, Daumier wanted to work with the Republic, to trust in the new politics. Needless to say, the impulse was foreign to him. between past and future  ( 111 )

Fig. 46  Honoré Daumier, Projet d’une médaille (DR 1745). Lithograph, 18.9 × 18.7 cm. Le Charivari, March 19, 1848. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Photo: BnF.

The shift occurred sometime around March 19. That day Le Charivari published Daumier’s final caricature of Louis-Philippe, a searing follow-up to Tout est perdu! in which the monarch’s bloated profile has been struck on a coin memorializing him as the “last king of the French” (to distinguish himself from his predecessors, Louis-Philippe had chosen to rule under this title, which was first introduced in 1791, instead of the more usual, territory-based “king of France”). Projet d’une médaille (fig. 46) is the least forgiving of the four lithographs Daumier produced in the wake of the February revolution; more than its counterparts, it recalls his caricatures from the 1830s. Modeled after Préault’s Aulus Vitellius, one of the sculptor’s medallions rejected by the Salon jury in 1834, Projet d’une médaille pins the legacy of the July Monarchy at once to sybaritic excess and the carnage of rappel à l’ordre—that is, to the moment when the title “king of the French” ceased to control the development of its constitutive ( 112 )  the revolution takes for m

contradiction. Gargantua is its pendant, the beginning to its end. With Projet d’une médaille, Daumier decided to give vent once and for all. Four days earlier, on the fifteenth, the Ministry of the Interior issued an appel aux artistes inviting France’s painters and sculptors to participate in open competitions for a symbolic figure of the Republic.36 The logic of the appel was straightforward: stained by the bloodletting of the Terror, the symbols of 1792 had to be refashioned, given a tranquil stability that spoke of peaceful progress and national unity rather than fear and endless war.37 Liberty had finally triumphed; the era of freedom had begun. The competitions were to provide the Second Republic with a symbol capable of realizing the new society it represented. They were to distinguish 1848 as the culmination of the “revolutionary tradition.” We do not know what, exactly, compelled Daumier to try his hand. In 1878, Edmond Duranty reported that Gustave Courbet and François Bonvin gave the decisive push.38 The encouragement and confidence of friends notwithstanding, entering the concours was a gamble for Daumier, whose heroes, until then, typically wore smocks and printer’s caps and whose public expected a good laugh, even when—perhaps especially when—it was the butt of the joke. Furthermore, Daumier resented allegory, its clever analogies and the glib rationalism with which it masked the incommensurability of its forms. “To hell with allegories, they’ve neither head nor tail!”: this was the response he gave Théodore de Banville when, a few months later, the poet asked him to design a new masthead for Le Corsaire. Daumier then elaborated, tongue-in-cheek: “Listen, a newspaper isn’t a boat and a pirate (corsaire) isn’t an author. Whichever way you figure it, you’ll end up with the same nonsense (ineptie): a journalist who writes with a cannon or a soldier who fights with a pen! No thank you, Lisette! We don’t eat that kind of bread in my family!”39 “One doesn’t draw words,” he insisted in another context, “one draws gestures, expressions.”40 The wager made sense to him, all the same. The competition presented an opportunity to change course, to realize the revolution differently, intimately, radically. It would introduce him as a painter. Here, Daumier had a chance to learn how to make pictures for rather than against. That was the trouble. In the first months after the revolution, no one quite knew what the Second Republic was or how it should be represented, how to heed its complexity while limiting its abstractness, how, that is, to give flesh—donner un corps is the French expression—to a concept (and form of life) still in dispute. At some point in March a sculptor—we do not know who—petitioned the Ministry of the Interior for instruction, and a ministry spokesman—some speculated it was Ledru-Rollin—replied with a set of guidelines as impractical as they were ideologically coherent: Your composition ought to unite liberty, equality, and fraternity in a single figure. The trinity forms the essential character of the subject. It is therefore between past and future  ( 113 )

necessary that signs of these three principles appear in your work. Your Republic should be seated in order to convey a sense of stability. If you were a painter, I’d tell you not to dress your figure in the tricolor to avoid committing any offense to art, but instead to have the colors of the nation dominate the picture. I almost forgot the Phrygian bonnet. Above I said that the Republic synthesized the three principles that constituted its symbol. You cannot omit this emblem of Liberty. Only you must transfigure it in some way. . . . Guard against giving your figure too bellicose an air. Think of moral force above all. Powerful as she is the Republic has no need to wear a helmet or hold a pike in her hand. . . . As there is no precedent for this figure, everything has to be invented. If you include the fasces, remove the axe.41 The eventual uniformity of the entries suggests that the ministry’s program made the rounds. Étienne-Jean Delécluze, the one-time Davidian who became chief critic for the Journal des débats, received a copy of the missive early on, and L’Artiste published it in full on April 30.42 The assistance was no doubt welcome, even if it raised as many questions as it answered. What the terms of the program lacked in workable detail was balanced by the disclosure of expectations. Don’t submit another Liberté guidant le peuple: this seems to have been the basic, unmistakable point. On April 17, nearly seven hundred paintings were shown to the public, just in time for those eager to get a look at the Republic before casting their ballots on the twenty-third. The competition was a shambles. “The public laughs,” Haussard groaned, “our artists blush, our school is slandered. The four or five hundred painted sketches exceed in their grotesque depravities anything anyone could have imagined.” “The enemies of competitions in the Fine Arts,” he concluded, “are enjoying a categorical triumph.”43 Critics like Haussard, responding in dismay more than disappointment, were willing to overlook matters of style and execution; at this early stage, substandard painting could be written off to a shortage of time and preparation. Poverty of thought, however, could not. The stakes were too high, especially after the jury-free Salon, by all accounts a failed experiment in democratic reorganization, mooted its own reason. At the end of April, the political ideals underwriting the 1848 Salon were coming to a head: art and republicanism had each been assigned the task of defining the possibilities (and limits) of the other. And the result, nearly everyone agreed, was monotony and pastiche, a convergence of Republics as turgid as they were useless (figs. 47–48). “I’m done rummaging through this chaos”: Haussard walked away in exasperation. Thoré urged most of the contestants to take up a new profession.44 Critics demanded exegesis and revelation, hard-working syntheses and unassailable unities of form and idea. They were depending on France’s painters to make the Republic real, to give it a body, an existence. In the end, what they saw were confused, ( 114 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 47  Ange-Louis Janet ( Janet-Lange), La République, 1848. Oil on canvas, 86.5 × 73.5 cm. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo: HIP / Art Resource, New York.

Fig. 48  Jules-Claude Ziegler, La République, 1848. Oil on canvas, 74 × 58 cm. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

often nonsensical collections of ill-fitting emblems and implausible attributes, none of them quite to the purpose, none of them of the moment. “Let’s be republicans,” one critic fretted, “but let’s also be of our own time and of our own country!”45 The conceptual mysteries of the Republic had simply been translated into visual form, “veritable rebuses”—that is, instead of a figure, distinct and self-sufficient and consensual, so many flailing attempts to define the Republic by burying it beneath piles of runic ornament, to make their meaning the Republic’s meaning, to flesh out the concept of the Republic, as it were, with extraneous, fungible bric-à-brac, background noise and philological niceties.46 Laurent Jan labeled the entries “epic emblem shops,” while Delécluze dismissed the whole lot as “completely insignificant.”47 Delécluze was not entirely unsympathetic, however; at fault, in his estimation, were not the artists themselves— at least not them alone—but the muddled demands of the competition and the incommodiousness of allegory, which restricted their resources to desiccated emblem books and hoary mythologies, the given and already known. In short, they had been dealt a losing hand. Paul Mantz put it this way: “The past yields nothing fertile when consulted on the symbol of the Revolution of 1848. It is his own heart that the artist must question.”48 Rather than possibilities, critics detected only limits; rather than the new, only the out-of-date. “Misfortune awaits those who, while addressing a new concept, rely on ancient forms and remain slaves of the past!”49 “Winners” had to be chosen nonetheless. Daumier’s entry placed eleventh, and his sketch, along with nineteen others (initially, the number was capped at three), was shown again in June. On the twelfth, the government paid each of the “winners” 500 francs to rework their sketches “en grand.” The final round of judgments was scheduled for October. Despite the lukewarm reception it received from the judges, Daumier’s version of the Republic (fig. 49) was singled out by critics as one of the competition’s few successes. Champfleury considered it without peer, seeing in its figure symbolique the coincidence of political and cultural renewal: No one will forget the unfortunate exhibition of Republics at the École des Beaux Arts. There were red Republics, pink Republics, green Republics, yellow Republics, Republics in marble, in stone, in ivory, Republics cooked up and seasoned, Republics scrubbed and scraped; Republics with the look of foliage, of national guards, arrayed in silk, in wool; Republics dressed in chains, in emblems, in nothing at all. . . . Citizen Thoré, who said he could not find a true Republic in the competition, had not seen on the first floor of the École des Beaux Arts, lost amid a throng of odious paintings, a simple canvas, serious and modest. A powerful woman sits with two children suckling at her breasts, at her feet two children read. The idea is very clear. ( 116 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 49  Honoré Daumier, La République, 1848. Oil on canvas, 73 × 60 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Franck Raux).

The Republic nourishes her children and instructs them. On that day I cried “long live the Republic,” because the Republic had given birth to a great painter. That painter is Daumier!50 La République nourrit ses enfants et les instruit. It is an apt description, admirable for its concision, incisive in its recognition that it ought not be otherwise. Perceiving the import of Daumier’s Republic—its truthfulness, the active meaning it had for its present—depends on it. Champfleury is right: “the idea is very clear.” Daumier has worked hard to make it so. Of course, Daumier could not dispense with time-honored iconographies altogether. The Republic could not do without a few telltale accessories: a tricolor flag topped with a Gallic cock, classical drapes, and a crown of laurel. These were invariables, the abcs of the republican idiom. The Republic had to be recognizable. But Daumier could clean it up, strip it down, purge it of hieroglyphics, of the rainbows, beehives, clasping hands, embracing cherubs, masons’ triangles, lions, swords, scales, and all the rest, all those ciphers that jostle one another in the canvases of his competitors. He could ration its forms, make them massive rather than prolix. His Republic could be a mother above all; she could have children rather than things, her social value located in the relationships she maintains and the actions she performs rather than the goods she accumulates, in lived situations rather than objectifications, verbs rather than nouns or adjectives. Joseph-Benoît Suvée’s Cornélie, mère des Gracques (1795) must have been a valuable resource for Daumier. Finally, he could rely on a woman’s body, her “natural” function, and thereby reduce the allegorical dimension of the Republic to a minimum, and in so doing he could resist, as much as possible, the propensity to assimilate incompatible worlds, to conjure up the spirits of the past to make sense of new ideas and to guarantee their significance by assigning them borrowed meanings—in short, to dress up the Republic in the guise of its former masters. By then the gods and heroes of the past—just look, for example, at any one of the fifty lithographs that make up the series Histoire ancienne (1841–43)—had come to represent, for Daumier, so many bourgeois affectations, so much hypocrisy and self-delusion, bathos instead of tragedy. What Daumier has done is substitute plain language for the additive and desultory syntax of his competitors, their reliance on stilted analogies and meanings by proxy. He divests the setting of time and place, makes it uniform and abstract, universal but not mythic or sacred or cosmological. It is blank, quiet, public—public because undivided, because unenclosed. He rakes a harsh light across the foreground, simplifying the picture’s forms and reinforcing the doggedly drawn outlines that circumscribe its monumental figures and affirm their difference from the space they inhabit. He ( 118 )  the revolution takes for m

anchors the composition by giving it the balance and structure of an equilateral triangle. (“To give the Republic wings! Imprudent! She might fly away!”51) Instead of blending his pigments, he applies them in broad, thick layers—light here, dark there. Where colors do mix, they turn gray and flat, something between shadow and description, form and absence. Daumier handles paint as if he were modeling clay, as if he were laying it over a mold with indefinite edges; he relies on the movement of his brush to confirm the basic shape of the form he has blocked in. The Republic’s breasts are the most salient example, their circularity doubled by the heads of her children who, in a bizarre expression of dependence, stand in for her areolas.52 There is a coarseness, even crudeness, to Daumier’s Republic and its manufacture; the signs of his effort remain in evidence. Again, I think Champfleury’s intuitions are correct: the painting is simple, serious, and modest. These are its dominant qualities, its basic tonality and temperament. Only read the three adjectives as inflections of one another rather than as a series. The meaningfulness of any one of them turns on its reflexive relation to the other two. Daumier has adapted the picture’s classicism to a different kind of public statement. His Republic bears its inelegance unabashedly; it makes inelegance matter. There were risks attached to proceeding by reduction. The resulting symbol might prove disobedient; it might refuse to signify the concept it claimed to embody. It might be taken, and this seems to have been the case in 1848, as just another code. For the most part, for almost everyone, Daumier’s materfamilias appeared inscrutable; for almost everyone, her relation to the Republic was invisible. Even allies struggled to discern the affinity between her form and her assigned content. The critic for L’Artiste was particularly emphatic: “admirable” as Daumier’s invention was on its own terms, he contended, it had “nothing to do with the concept of the Republic.”53 Haussard was convinced he saw only the Charity that gave Daumier’s Republic her shape and ruled the work en dehors du concours. The prototype, in his view, simply overwhelmed the adaptation: “The Republic,” he insisted, “hasn’t been figured; it’s been disguised.”54 For Mantz, the more pertinent question had to do with the intrinsic limitations of the prototype itself, which he identified with greater precision: not any Charity but Andrea del Sarto’s. The reference was not undue. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Andrea del Sarto’s Caritas (fig. 50) was considered a hallowed example of its type, and Mantz, certain the distinction had merit, proffered its heroine as a demonstration of how the serenity and repose of a seated figure, when properly handled, translated into imposing grandeur and solemnity.55 Yet even as he pronounced Andrea’s Charity the paragon of benevolence and motherly virtue, he questioned her suitability as a model for the Republic. As Mantz saw it, capacity rather than oversaturation introduced the impasse: “The Republic is also Charity,” he concurred, “yet she is a good deal more than that, too. In her supreme force must be combined with supreme tenderness. She is like the ancient Themis, law incarnate; she has the fecund flanks of Ceres, the chaste between past and future  ( 119 )

Fig. 50  Andrea del Sarto, Caritas, 1518. Oil on canvas, 185 × 137 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Tony Querrec).

beauty of Diana, and the wise spirit of Minerva.”56 The trouble for Mantz, in other words, was not the intention. He agreed that Charity was essential to the Republic. On her own, however, she remained underdeveloped; she needed to be completed. It was here, in the elaboration, that Mantz believed Daumier had fallen short: “M. Daumier’s genial sketch,” he concluded, “could have better fulfilled the terms of the program. It’s only a charity.”57 Thoré’s La Vraie République published Mantz’s review on June 18, only days before the government disbanded the National Workshops. Mantz was right to presume the Republic had begun to splinter. Civil war was less than a week away; a revised grammar of politics was in the making. I imagine it was for this reason that, by herself, Charity would not do. She spoke too poignantly, too singularly of what was being lost; she made too clear what would be needed. In spite of herself, Charity signified the coming dissolution. Daumier never made good on his 500 francs. By the October deadline, he had withdrawn from the competition. We do not know for certain whether he ever set to ( 120 )  the revolution takes for m

Fig. 51  Honoré Daumier, Une foule, ca. 1848. Oil on canvas, 91 × 70 cm. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Photo: Maltaper / Wikimedia Commons.

work on the final painting. Gautier says he did and attributes his failure to finish it on time to lassitude and inexperience.58 Perhaps. Perhaps, as Mantz believed, Daumier simply could not get the image—its proper balance—right. Champfleury ventures a different sort of guess: disillusion.59 With regard to what, precisely, he does not explain; he offers only a vague reference to Daumier’s willful intelligence and its inclination toward doubt. Surely the June Days had something to do with Daumier’s decision to choose desertion. After massacre, arbitrary justice, and martial law, identifying the Second Republic with Charity, and having that unity stand for the commonweal, must have seemed disingenuous, if not dangerous. I suspect Daumier began working on his “revolutionary studies”—in addition to L’Émeute, Une foule (fig. 51) and Famille sur la barricade (fig. 52)—sometime between June and October. At least this is my sense of the timing. We know little more about Une foule and Famille sur la barricade than we do about L’Émeute; hard facts pertaining to any one of them remain in short supply. It seems unlikely, all the same, that Daumier could have painted the three pictures before the cataclysm and disenchantment of June 23. On this art historians agree. None of these scholars, however, has gone on to ask what the belatedness of the three pictures does to the image of rebellion they construct. Here, then, is my hypothesis, flatly stated: that L’Émeute, Une foule, and between past and future  ( 121 )

Fig. 52  Honoré Daumier, Famille sur la barricade, ca. 1848. Oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. National Gallery, Prague. Photo © National Gallery Prague 2022.

Famille sur la barricade, even if my time frame needs adjustment, are connected to the doubt and disillusion that persuaded Daumier to bow out of the Republic competition. Of the three works, only Une foule departed Daumier’s studio before 1879. At some point, Daumier had given the painting to Charles-François Daubigny and agreed to have it shown at the Durand-Ruel exhibition. It was there, in 1878, that the picture received its first title. No date for Une foule, however, appears in the catalogue Champfleury compiled for the event. And while critics considered Une foule a remarkable achievement—one even opined that its “collection of citizens crying ‘to arms’ ” was enough to send the ghost of old Rude into fits of jealousy—they tell us nothing concrete about the painting’s development.60 How could they, when they likely knew nothing of it themselves? The one person who could have filled in the gaps, Daubigny, died shortly after the exhibition was first announced. The closest we can come to fixing a date for Famille sur la barricade is to place it before September 1849. A study for the painting, a tête d’homme in black chalk, has a fragment of La Commune de Paris, a Neo-Jacobin paper that issued its final number on the ninth of that month, pasted on its back.61 The identification of this man—a weathered worker, white-haired and balding, his face furrowed, his eyes sunken—with La Commune de Paris tells us something about the political underpinnings of Famille sur la barricade. “What is the people?” the tagline of La Commune de Paris inquires, its radicalization of Abbé Sieyès’s Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-État? (1789) both conspicuous and self-aware. “Everything.” It continues: “Live while working or die while fighting. The time has come for us to close ranks. Let us unite for the security of the pure republic.”62 Jean Adhémar presumes that Daumier intended to give the drawing to one of his “friends on the far-left.”63 The scrap of newspaper, which assimilates the drawing to the temporality of Daumier’s lithographs, tells us something as well about the extent to which Daumier kept up with politics, but not much else, at least nothing more than we can deduce for ourselves. There is, in any case, little question that both Une foule and Famille sur la barricade, like L’Émeute, refer back to February. In Une foule worker and bourgeois—the same as those who appear at the center of L’Émeute—appear next to each other, face to face, their difference marked by a simple contrast of black and white, habit and blouse, top hat and tousled blonde hair. How the two men move together nevertheless confirms their allegiance. The one complements the other; theirs is a unity in spite of difference. The inclined bodies of the two men fill up most of the picture space, whose shallow depth of field, accentuated by the obtuse angle of conjoining walls, elongates the diagonal of their forward movement and intensifies the torsion—bodies one way, heads another—that dramatizes the painting’s feeling of anticipation. The followers in the crowd around them, as if drawn by a lure, conform to the slope of the worker’s between past and future  ( 123 )

gesture, his hand just about to push through the green door that impedes their progress. A white light from above and behind, which redoubles the effect of the long diagonal that cuts across the picture, simplifies the forms and features it strikes, drowns others in near total obscurity; the two figures at right are reduced to little more than abstract shapes and volumes. Neither the detail nor the noise of revolt matters here. Worker and bourgeois look backward with the same tight-lipped attentiveness. The battle cry comes later. It is the coordinated motion of revolt, its cadence and potential and directedness, that delivers the picture’s message. Une foule, as T. J. Clark suggests, evinces the concision of “poster art”: “It insists, it does not quite describe.”64 Famille sur la barricade adopts a different disposition. Here, Daumier brings us up close. Only the heads and torsos of the painting’s protagonists are visible. The relation of this family to the conflict evoked nevertheless remains unclear. Daumier does not construct a mise-en-scène to situate us; the painting’s background, a simple range of flat grays, is undeveloped. Nor does he give the family much room to move. Edges, throughout Famille sur la barricade, appear inviolable. Noses touch or approach the picture’s frame; they do not transgress it. There is, as it were, no place outside of the crowd. The old worker—he is the one from the chalk drawing—seems nonetheless to be ushering his two children, son and daughter, either toward or away from a barricade, which, as usual, has not been depicted. Those in the crowd behind, who, like the family, have their backs to the light radiating at left, might suggest the former, toward rather than away. We cannot be sure. No one shouts, “To arms!” No one speaks at all. In Famille sur la barricade, the men, women, and children who embody “the people” overlap more than they interact. Some sort of disturbance, maybe the first stirrings of the fight, has occurred in the rear, compelling mother and son to look back in trepidation, the one wide-eyed, the other wary. The father, too, turns to see what has happened but does not share the apprehension of the others; at least he does not show it. The harsh light he faces has cast his deep-set eyes, along with much of his left side, in shadow. His is the head of a physiognomic study, his countenance between revelation and concealment. Expressiveness resides in the uneven shape his features have taken over time, as the result of cumulative experience. In him, domestic and public life are twinned. The conception, at this point, must have stalled, for Daumier abandoned it, leaving Famille sur la barricade to others to retouch and finish. This time the presence of later hands is all but certain. Merge Une foule and Famille sur la barricade, their forms and their tonalities, and the result bears a striking resemblance to L’Émeute. Each of the pictures appears different; Daumier has painted them in different styles. Yet they are made of the same stuff. They share forms, gestures, and iconographies, at times reworked and adapted, often simply transplanted from one canvas to another; they share an interest in what happens when individual bodies come together and form a single body, and in what ( 124 )  the revolution takes for m

that unity—that crowd, that mass, that family—looks like as it floods city streets and the narrow spaces of the quartier—in what it looked like when “the people” was said to re-create the spaces it liberated. The same query drives them, in other words. The three paintings turn on the same anachronistic idiom. There is, however, a modesty to Daumier’s “revolutionary studies,” a solemnity and sobriety to their vision of the revolution. Even as they recycle the disabused tropes of February, they express none of the certainty, none of the triumphalism, that made these tropes, at first, such intoxicating signs of things to come, of a future whose promesse de bonheur had taken on the character of inevitability. In a word, Daumier’s is not the vantage of a victor. He knew the June Days had gutted the language he was drawing on; the disenchantment and pessimism spreading across the Left could not be ignored. He returned to February anyway, and he did so unambiguously, insistently, defiantly, which is not to say confidently or trenchantly or enthusiastically. Even if, that is, the lyrical illusion of February had lost its valence, he seems to have thought that a meaningful response to the present situation lay embedded in its cardinal forms. So he reprised those forms, but not to transfigure them or to expose their lies and mystifications. These pictures refrain from pointing fingers; they do not vilify. The exigencies of defeat and failure rather than resentment ground their pivot. The revolution, indeed, had once again been betrayed, but this time the pressing questions arising from the betrayal had less to do with outright theft than the nature of the victory itself. The Left, too, had to rethink its orienting images, its ways of seeing and handling its relation to the past, to actual events that constituted its past. It had to ask itself when it was that it lost control of them completely. The “revolutionary studies” resist being read as apologias or, in any straightforward sense, as critiques; they are not quite for, not quite against. February emerges in them, rather, as a past charged with the here and now, the dream of happiness conceived as the experience of defeat. Their subject is greatness come to nothing. It is for this reason that I want their conception, however provisional or preliminary, to have coincided with the onset of doubt and indecision. I see these three paintings, in other words, as Daumier’s attempts to reconcile himself with the Republic and to come to grips with what it became at the end of June, with what it resembled now that thousands of its “children” lay in common graves while thousands of others— those fortunate ones who had not been trotted out before the firing squads—were en route to New Caledonia or Belle-Île-en-Mer. The dream of reason had produced its monsters, and this was what the nightmare-world looked like, what a republic that was also an enemy looked like. Even Tocqueville trembled at the sight of the “retrograde movement”: “Where,” he marveled, “will it stop?”65 “With the past no longer illuminating the future,” he remarked elsewhere, “the mind marches on in darkness.”66 These words, written into the final pages of De la démocratie en Amérique, do little to conceal between past and future  ( 125 )

the despair that inspired them; they were meant to evoke the sense of tragic loss that accompanied the emergence of modern society, this new world for which a “new political science” was needed. Daumier likely had not encountered them. But in the late summer of 1848, they could very well have been his. At least they seem to me to capture the key in which the “revolutionary studies” are painted. The past could not be saved as a whole. Nor could it be disregarded, its meaning repressed (refoulé). The “thread of tradition”—call it the “revolutionary tradition” or the “spell of the barricade”—could not be restored. What remained was still the past, but a past now bereft of consistency and continuity, a past that, as such, no longer retained its authority—“a fragmented past,” as Arendt describes it, “which [had] lost its certainty of evaluation.”67 The question Daumier faced—it is the question I think L’Émeute raises—was how deep the reconstruction would have to go, or rather, from what vantage the past, those elements of it still meaningful and relevant to the present, might be seen anew. Was it possible, in other words, to reestablish a link with the past, not to resuscitate it as it was but to reveal its lost potential, a weight and influence it had not had before? In short, could the past be recovered negatively, as a “fragmented past,” outside the tradition that had lent it coherence as it was handed down? Tocqueville considered any such effort “honest” but “sterile.” The present state of society—“so new, so confused”—could not be grasped, he maintained, “with ideas that have been drawn from those which are no longer.” Knowledge of the new simply was not possible in the non-truths of the old. “It [was] other.” At the same time, Tocqueville recognized that the world coming into being was still “half entwined [engagé] with the debris of the world that [was] falling.” For Tocqueville, however, the present engagement of past and future spoke less of a relation or process of development than an entanglement of antinomies. The nexus of conflict could be clearly seen, definitively placed, but not, it would seem, transposed into meaningful expression. The past, “all the goods and all the evils it brought with it,” appeared before Tocqueville as a pile of insignificant rubble, ruins from which the criteria of action were no longer to be drawn. Judgment of the present situation, to be just, would have to come from the heights of divine contemplation, the “point of view of God.”68 Daumier was not so sure. At least he was unwilling, for the time being, to survey the confusion from above. The difficulty of Daumier’s task lay in its execution, the contradiction any staging of transfiguration could neither suppress nor resolve. Fragmentation, in effect, had become the conditio sine qua non of the past. Accordingly, recollection in the present would be determined by the extent to which the past appeared before the assaying mind’s eye as itself and other at the same time—that is, incomplete. Figuring this type of to-and-fro between identity and nonidentity was not an altogether new procedure ( 126 )  the revolution takes for m

for Daumier. After all, the success of his caricatures hinged on their ability to impersonate those he wished to annihilate. Unities of this kind—namely, unities without synthesis—structured the better part of his imagery in the 1830s and 1840s.69 Baudelaire attributed this property of Daumier’s art to caricature’s very constitution, its doubleness. In caricature, Baudelaire maintained, idea and drawing, although inseparable, remained noncoincident.70 The disturbance thus generated, which delayed apprehension, permitted the contingency of the correspondence to come forth. Laughter, as “shattered articulation,” was the only natural response.71 For Baudelaire, the effect of caricature had less to do with the cunning of its mockery than the crisis of identity it exemplified. Caricature was a comic art that did not presuppose “happiness.” Pinned to the here and now of its production and consumption—imitative more than creative, in Baudelaire’s terms—it neither imagined nor imaged an escape from impurity to which it bore witness. Insofar, then, as caricature activated its own doubleness, thereupon depriving its audience of “peace of mind,” it formulated a solution to the conditions of modern life by staging its own historicity allegorically. It prized the jolting force of incongruity and mésalliance, relying on the arrest of dialectics, the irreconcilability of opposites—of subject and object—within the totality of the image. Caricature was one thing. Its power originated in its distinctive ability to express an emergent form of life, one based on the principle of equivalence. Caricature staged that which could only be seen in negative. When Daumier worked outside of caricature’s framework, he viewed this allegorical dimension of his practice with distrust. For once allegory withdrew the self-sufficiency of meaning from a given representation, it threatened to insinuate itself everywhere, rendering irrepressible the possibility that anything could mean either itself or its opposite.72 In response, Daumier’s hand grew heavy. The positivism of Rue Transnonain—more than the reductions of La République or the self-awareness of Daumier’s comments to Banville—makes this clear. What shifted, for Daumier, was the relation of representation to the political. Caricature’s necessary alignment with the consumption habits of society ceased to be tractable. The things of the world had to be kept in place. The possibilities of sameness more than otherness therefore directed his practice. Daumier, I am sure, would have admired Arendt’s proposition about works of art, that “they are the worldliest of all things.”73 Artworks had the ability to make non-worldly contents and concerns worldly realities; moreover, they could not be used up. Durability was what mattered to him. The line I have drawn between Daumier’s work in and outside of caricature is neither absolute nor firm. Real differences subsist between the two representational modes, and we ought to keep those dissimilarities in view. But we cannot make them into the petrified stuff of categories. Daumier doesn’t. The same questions about representation subtend them, and the same presentiment, the possibility of fraudulence and travesty, engenders them. At times—in L’Émeute as in Rue Transnonain—the two between past and future  ( 127 )

modes clash; they become antagonists. Call the one “punisher” and the other “savior.” In these instances, the line between them becomes a battleground. For Baudelaire, indeed, it is the way in which a work like Rue Transnonain gathers antagonistic forces together into its own image—its own presence—that drives it beyond caricature and history in the ordinary sense. It struggles with both. Perhaps I can put it this way: some version of the opening lines to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte haunts Daumier’s imagery. Some version, some comparable opposition of genres. The transferability of Marx’s exact terms—tragedy and farce—concerns me less than the syndrome he diagnoses, in which the authority enacted by tradition no longer presents itself historically.74 Yet in the case of L’Émeute, Marx’s terms are Daumier’s terms. Here is the famous passage itself: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances attending the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire!”75 Marx’s corrective occurred in Eighteenth Brumaire for a second time. The formulation first appeared eight years earlier, in the 1844 manuscript “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right.’ ” There, Marx adopts the language of aesthetics to characterize the nature of the German ancien régime and the conditions of its belated decline in the 1840s. The clarity of the initial account—it has few of the rhetorical flourishes that suffuse the later rendering—makes it instructive. I quote it more or less in full: The struggle against the political present in Germany is the struggle against the past of the modern nations, who are still continually troubled by the reminiscences of this past. It is instructive for them to see the ancien régime, which experienced its moment of tragedy in their history, play its comic role as a German ghost. Its history was tragic so long as it was the privileged power in the world and freedom was a personal fancy; in short, so long as it believed, and necessarily so, in its own justification. So long as the ancien régime, as the existing world order, struggled against a new world coming into existence, it was guilty of a world-historical, but not a personal, error. Its decline was, therefore, tragic. The present German régime, on the other hand—an anachronism, a flagrant contradiction of universally recognized axioms, the nullity of the ancien régime revealed to the whole world—only imagines that it believes in itself, and asks that the world imagine this also. If it believed in its own nature, would it hide that nature under the appearance of an alien nature, ( 128 )  the revolution takes for m

and seek its preservation in hypocrisy and sophistry? The modern ancien régime is nothing but the humbug of a world order whose real heroes are dead. History is thorough, and passes through many phases when it conveys an old form to the grave. The final phase of a world-historical form is its comedy. . . . Why does history proceed in this way? So that mankind will separate itself happily from its past.76 Tragedy turns on self-misunderstanding, comedy on self-deception. Or as Benjamin once wrote, “everything depends on how one believes in one’s belief.”77 It was this “how” that, after June, left Daumier ill at ease. The revolutionary project had failed; about this he had no illusions. But failure did not mean futility. That which had been wasted was not without worth. For Daumier, the question of belief could not be asked without sadness. The past would have to be negated if its truth were again to be found.78 With L’Émeute Daumier entered the terrain of aporetic activity. Like caricature— and by caricature, here, I mean its allegorical rather than physiognomic character— L’Émeute had to devour its adversary, working to destroy the coherence of its image-world by incorporating it undialectically, that is, by denying it the conceptual unity granted by instrumental reason and thereby voiding it of intention. At the same time, it had to ensure that the elements of the past it gathered to itself retained their conditioning power; otherwise, if they did not, they would amount to nothing more than “a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world.”79 Authority itself had to be refounded if the blind alley of the present was to be transformed into a new opening, a worldly space in which what had so far been left unthought and unseen could emerge. Allegory is what L’Émeute had to be and what it had not to be. The picture’s sense of the revolution resides in the stalemate. Nothing in L’Émeute speaks more directly, more agonizingly to its “unhappy consciousness,” than the painting’s buildup of layers, which strive repeatedly to lay the groundwork for belief—in other words, to know the painting’s object in the object itself.80 Yet these recursions—this work L’Émeute does as if in spite of itself—also create the conditions of the painting’s impasse, the problem it goes at and over with heartbreaking persistence. Look through the highlights, the black contours, the passages of muddied gray pigment that weave over the one and under the other (fig. 53): the émeutier at the picture’s center threatens to recede into the thick crowd of followers behind him, to become indistinguishable—a shape blocked in, there, even intelligible, but never much more than a sign (a swatch of flesh-colored paint, one kind of hat or another, and so on). The painting’s scumbling begins to insist on its brokenness. The reddish-brown of the underpainting becomes salient, a positive value, loosening the picture’s hold on the world it envisions. The additions were necessary. Individually, layer by layer, they work to establish the revolutionary’s presence. Only the layers never quite add between past and future  ( 129 )

Fig. 53  Honoré Daumier, detail of L’Émeute (fig. 40). Photo © The Phillips Collection.

up; they do not resolve. Take, for example, the highlights, which bear no logical relation to the brilliant sunlight that illuminates the painting’s inner half, the not quite near, not quite distant view of the urban environment. They insist on the revolutionary’s appearance in this world over and against the coherence of illusion. L’Émeute’s layers therefore perform a double function: they develop against the grain of presentation, interrupt it, and, at the same time, concentrate within themselves that which is presented. Each of them brings the émeutier closer to the picture plane, toward us, which is to say, against the left-to-right flow of narrative continuity and action, in fragments. The conditions of his proximity are also the conditions of his déception. I see no presage in L’Émeute, no reimagining of the future and its determinations, no signs of the “not-yet-conscious” that Ernst Bloch aligns with the impulse of hope. I ( 130 )  the revolution takes for m

cannot, with Adhémar, hear the blond, hollow-eyed worker singing “La Marseillaise.”81 Nor can I imagine the canaille he leads, pace Frank Jewett Mather, as “the mob of all times.”82 The heedless paladin invoked by Duncan Phillips, who acquired the painting in 1925, gets closer, I think, to the painting’s mood: “Blind to the immediate consequences of his words and acts, haunted by the future, he is the anonymous standard bearer of innumerable battles without name.”83 As does Alexandre’s demigod: “The types of the figures in the throngs are curiously free from exaggeration, and yet are somehow unforgettable. At the head a fanatic advances, whose unreal beauty and false eloquence have drawn the somber crowd in his wake.”84 These are terms of praise, even if they describe a madcap rabble-rouser in shirtsleeves who “shouts violent words.”85 “As Delacroix expressed what we may call the lyrical side of revolution,” Alexandre goes on to say, “so Daumier has in this case . . . sculptured the features of a mob.”86 An “avenging angel of the barricades,” this agitator, for L’Émeute’s first critics, has the revolution both ways.87 He is a fanatic but a sublime fanatic, a modern Prometheus. “The followers,” Phillips continues, “are like fluttering moths fatally attracted to the magnetic flame.”88 I doubt Daumier would have approved of these descriptions. The issue in L’Émeute isn’t “false eloquence,” or even betrayal, but the hopelessness of the whole situation, which goes deeper than authenticity. The forms of representation available on the Left and on the Right were equally unworthy of trust; indeed, they had become virtually indistinguishable. L’Émeute acknowledges the resulting ambiguity. Nowhere does it attempt to prize the alternatives apart, readjust their alignment, and affirm their difference. The assimilation itself is L’Émeute’s burden. The painting despairs, then, of a tomorrow no different from today, a tomorrow of continued bad faith—instead of Michelet’s “each epoch dreams of the one to follow,” something closer to Adorno’s “each epoch dreams of itself as annihilated by catastrophes.”89 L’Émeute pulls away from the “magnetic flame” and faces away from the horizon. In so doing, it foregrounds a symbolic form that, since Géricault, coordinated heroic action with unattainability.90 Yet this tragic figure gets turned around in Daumier’s painting. L’Émeute looks back toward its viewers, into the darkness of the lived moment. Its revolutionary moves that way. Or rather, like the others in the front line, he leans that way, all of them bent at the waist as if their inclined bodies had gotten away from legs we cannot see. Daumier adapted this strategy for reconciling spatial proximity and movement from Famille sur la barricade. There, he discovered a way of reorienting Une foule, of turning it toward the painting’s surface—indeed, of bringing the worker right up against the painting’s surface—without sacrificing pictorial dynamism; there, he saw a way of ridding Une foule of the final vestiges of readerliness. The green door in Une foule becomes, in L’Émeute, the picture plane, only this time there is no outside. The hand and arm of Daumier’s worker are made to come full stop. In 1830, Delacroix between past and future  ( 131 )

also turned the insurgent’s hand and arm toward the picture plane, but he cast them in uniform shadow, which affirmed their relative distance and hence capacity for forward movement. Delacroix’s Liberty contested painting’s enclosure. The revolutionary in L’Émeute does not. His hand and arm appear, instead, to draw the crowd of hopeless followers into a temporary shelter. Blind to the future, L’Émeute risks full surrender to its own “bleak wisdom.”91 But better that danger, Daumier seems to say, better that risk and that clear-sightedness than the false consolations of ideological and aesthetic redemption, of a history too sure of its direction. Better, that is, to look historical failure square in the face. Once Daumier did look toward the future, he saw a baleful world of refugees, families dispossessed of home and identity, their wandering one-way yet indeterminate, in a direction, as it were, without bearing. Tout est perdu! He saw his Republic among them: she trudges onward, almost dead center, in the relief version of Les Fugitifs (fig. 54), one child slung over her right shoulder, another clutching her left hand and leading the way, the third a few paces ahead. Daumier repeated the exercise in relief twice, in wax and in clay. Neither mold survives, and no one knows for sure which came first; all we have are the plaster casts Geoffroy Dechaume produced sometime in the 1860s or 1870s and the bronze that eventually followed. Daumier’s hand in the experiment concluded with the two prototypes; they would prove the first and last of his forays into the technique. Les Fugitifs is something of a one-off, then, its medium particular to the fractured world it depicts and the halting procession of untouchables—“the panathenaeans of Misery,” as Benoist figures it—that lumbers, naked and faceless, across its shallow, blank field, neither its beginning nor its end in view.92 The world of these refugees, it seems, had to be planar, a world in parallels. Daumier, it is true, revisited the subject several times over the next two decades, but when he did, he painted it in oils and from a different vantage (figs. 55–56). He gave the roving hordes a setting—a rugged landscape, a dramatic depth of field, an atmosphere dense and heavy yet almost always alleviated by a parting of its charcoal clouds. He gave them clothing, horses and dogs, a diversity of movements, a first or last in line. The caravans in the oils move at oblique angles to the surface plane—the direction itself varies from picture to picture—rather than parallel to it, into and out of space rather than against it. The world they inhabit is hostile, its buffeting winds and desolate, craggy terrain manifestations of the disharmony between the refugees who traverse it and the substratum of their actions. All the same, a feeling of resignation obtains: even if the direction these refugees take betrays no meaning, it is a direction nonetheless. The stars continue to show the way. A way. The world of the oils is inhospitable and alienating; it imperils those made to roam its wilds, but it is

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Fig. 54  Honoré Daumier, Les Fugitifs, ca. 1848/49. Plaster, 54.5 × 93.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Hervé Lewandowski).

Fig. 55  Honoré Daumier, Les Fugitifs, 1852–55. Oil on wood, 16.2 × 28.7 cm. Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris. Photo: CC0 Paris Musées / Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Fig. 56  Honoré Daumier, Les Fugitifs, ca. 1868. Oil on canvas, 38.1 × 67.95 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis. Photo © Minneapolis Institute of Art / The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund.

neither savage nor predatory, neither intractable nor incoherent. It does not close in around them. Les Fugitifs bears the scars of Daumier’s shifting perception, its surface scored by sculptor’s knife and comb, its massive forms plied into shape by indomitable frame and thickset thumb. The relief has the look of something forged rather than modeled, and its figures, faceted and fragmentary, the uneven appearance of masses forcibly assembled, of bodies made rather than bodies realized; that is, instead of the illusion of autonomous, self-actuating bodies, aggregates of painstaking gestures, of a plastic substance coaxed this way and that, this way then that, hewn here, sutured there. There is a discontinuity in Daumier’s handling of the relief, an irregularity and dividedness in the execution, as if he had worked fitfully or by the piece. The refugees appear monumental nonetheless. They overcrowd the relief ’s modest dimensions—top to bottom, right to left. Yet theirs is an odd sort of monumentality, a monumentality of coarse and broken forms whose substantiality is confirmed not by the semblance of their integrity but by the network of fissures cutting through them. Daumier has left the ligature of these bodies fully in evidence. I do not get the sense, however, that he has done so

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to illuminate the fallibility or falsehood of unified form. Daumier works hard to keep these bodies together, to make the piecework add up. The fissures matter, then, but as intervals. Having occurred in the process of formation, they signal, at once, the possibility of disintegration and active resistance to it. It is the tension between the two states that seems to interest Daumier, what its momentary suspension might reveal about the human condition and what it might mean for those who, banished from civil society, must search for new bases of human community.93 Some of the refugees have been no more than blocked in, as if Daumier, on second thought, rubbed them down. They endure, but as partial figures, vestiges of bodily forms that bleed almost imperceptibly into the relief ’s roughened ground. The depth of the procession, it turns out, is as immeasurable as its breadth; the number of its members is unlimited. Nearly as important—it is the crucial difference between the oils and the relief—is the suggestion that the ground plane of Les Fugitifs has lost its relative neutrality, or rather, its simple negativity. It erodes the titans who move across it and, along the way, the interspaces that enable us to stabilize the structural difference between figure and ground, supporter and container of meaning. Just look, for instance, at the Republic’s sunken waist, how its flatness becomes a kind of pivot as her lower half pulls her inward while her upper half, modeled in high relief but without undercutting, pulls away (fig. 57). Neither face nor breast, a front side to her body, disengages from the mass of plaster that forcibly binds her to the relief ’s armature. Or look at the fragment of a man in front of her, one row in, who seems to dissolve before our eyes, the violence of his gradual decomposition registered by the formless objectivity of the gouge marks that eat into his flesh. This kind of to-and-fro recurs, almost person to person, across the relief; body parts—heads, torsos, legs, feet—have gone missing. The ambiguity is, of course, intrinsic to relief sculpture, and in general, only the slightest indications of contrast and absence are needed to deactivate the possibility of collapse. I do not pretend that Les Fugitifs denies us these points de repère; clearly it does not. What I believe it does do is locate the moment of danger by internalizing the precarious condition of its dramatis personae. The prominent ledge on which Daumier positions the row of refugees closest to the surface, perhaps more than any other detail in the relief, clarifies the stakes: it affirms salience as the mechanism of differentiation, yet it does so only at the expense of the continuity it ought to guarantee. The ledge secures a ground level; it promises these refugees a footing; it confirms their contact with the earth as a space for movement and an a priori condition of human life. This ground level, however, is inconsistent with the ground plane perpendicular to which it has been built up. The two are joined but do not coincide. Standing on the world, here, is not the same as being in it.

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Fig. 57  Honoré Daumier, detail of Les Fugitifs (fig. 54). Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York (Hervé Lewandowski).

Devoid of signs that either a natural or human world exists beyond it yet marked by the traces of its manufacture, the relief ’s ground derogates its raison d’être and becomes, instead, something of a positive value, an obtrusive back wall that jostles the friezelike procession that unfolds against it. The ground trespasses, but not, it seems, to introduce a set of counter-meanings, not to challenge the priority of the figure as what supports meaning. The ground is barren, its worked surface never coalescing into object or view, never discovering a world of places and things, a world in-between. It gives a presence—a materiality, an objectivity—to absence, to no-place and no-thing, and in turn, it enforces a kind of representational deadlock, a state of nonproductivity and noncreativity. Not only, then, does the relief ’s ground deprive the cortège of a place in the world; it renders the refugees who constitute it incapable of effective action, of realizing a world, any world, by appearing in it. Displacement in Les Fugitifs has a ( 136 )  the revolution takes for m

totalizing force (Arendt would say a depoliticizing force): it exposes these men, women, and children to the fate of human beings who, having lost their orientation in a world common to them and others, are nothing but human beings. Daumier’s Republic consequently undergoes a transformation: she becomes Mother of Pariahs and Outlaws, Mother of a People, that is to say, unprotected by common right or political convention, those, in short, who seek their home but never find it, those for whom this seeking is their affliction. Deracinated, they live every tomorrow as they live today, every step rendered heavy by the same burdensome thought: nothing new lies in wait; nothing new can be started. They move in permanence, yet the only place they go—the only place they dwell in—is nowhere.94 (Les Fugitifs, one could say, shows us the verso of the lithographs with which Daumier greeted the Republic’s arrival, chez elle, in March.) Relief sculpture introduced Daumier to a different way of handling masses and spaces; it revealed a different range of tonalities. He made good on the lessons at once. Shortly after beginning Les Fugitifs—the timing, once again, can only be approximated— Daumier drew the Émeute now in the Ashmolean Museum (fig. 58), a work assumed to have been conceived, alongside Camille Desmoulins au Palais-Royal (fig. 59) and an inchoate Scène de la Révolution, as part of a project to illustrate Henri Martin’s Histoire de France. The ascription remains uncertain, however. No documents concerning the project have survived, and the enterprise itself, probably due to insufficient resources, was abandoned sometime in the 1850s. The drawing, moreover, is widely believed to be unfinished, a general idea sketched in without the firmness of detail or color. Consequently, we have no means of knowing for sure which part of France’s history L’Émeute is supposed to depict. It cannot be linked, like Camille Desmoulins, to a specific narrative or personality. Nor does it seem to conform to the cause-andeffect logic of annales. This riot has neither name nor history, provides no signs of a casus belli, draws no clear distinction between “us” and “them,” victims and executioners. Indeed, it thwarts the category of origin altogether. Alexandre, who bought the drawing from Mme. Daumier in 1891, listed it in his sale catalogue of 1903 simply as “dramatic composition.”95 Ever since, it has gone by an array of competing titles: if not L’Émeute, then Une barricade qui vient d’être atteinte, La Destruction de Sodome, or, most recently, The Destruction of a City.96 Laughton, perhaps rightly bypassing the problem of titles, suggests instead that we consider it a “universal allegory about the destructive forces of man”—a modern Dance of Death, so to speak, only in this instance autogenous and punitive and worldly, the End of Days realized as an act of autodestruction.97 Whether or not L’Émeute explicitly depicts a revolutionary scene seems to me of relatively minor importance. Surely revolution—its violence and disorder, its way of distorting one’s features and making one’s voice grow harsh—is the drawing’s organizing point of reference. between past and future  ( 137 )

Fig. 58  Honoré Daumier, L’Émeute, ca. 1848–50. Charcoal, black chalk, gray wash, sepia wash, and gouache, 58 × 43 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Photo © Ashmolean Museum.

Fig. 59  Honoré Daumier, Camille Desmoulins au Palais-Royal, ca. 1850. Black chalk, pen and ink, wash, watercolor, and gouache, 55.7 × 44.8 cm. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Photo: Wikiart.

Trawling the techniques of sculpture for fresh possibilities in drawing, as we have seen, had long since been a regular practice for Daumier. His République, no less than Rue Transnonain, owes a great deal to his engagements with them. Only this time relief sculpture rather than sculpture in the round—Préault, say, more than Michelangelo— led the way. Instead, then, of massive forms shaped by broad lighting and deep shadows, both of them working to create a sense of solidity and volume, density and weight— both of them, moreover, in order and under control—forms are cut into facets by hatched-in shadows and gray wash, the surface wildly animated by a matrix of crisscrossing lines, bodies marked rather than modeled, their flesh scarred as if by the muscle, sinew, and bone beneath it, as if it were agony just to have a body, at least one of these bodies configured like so many puzzle pieces that do not quite line up. Certitude is not something the Ashmolean L’Émeute—either its handling or its conception—evinces. Look, for instance, at the man, just left of center (fig. 60), who turns back toward the crowd, an implausible arm—it is all bone and all rubber—thrown over his head, or the two grimacing heads—one at bottom, the other just right of center—that seem neither quite of the crowd nor apart from it, but appearing to fill in empty space,98 or the diagonal lines that rise up out of the throng yet describe nothing in particular, those closest to the picture plane smudged if not partially erased. These are results, no doubt, of trial between past and future  ( 139 )

Fig. 60  Honoré Daumier, detail of L’Émeute (fig. 58). Photo © Ashmolean Museum.

and error but also of indecision; their inscrutability evidences the sense of unease and unfamiliarity on which the image as a whole turns. L’Émeute bears the signs of an experiment, an image whose conception appears to have coincided with its groping formation—in short, study and final draft in one. It grows on the page in faltering stages, alternating layers of charcoal, black chalk, gray or sepia wash, and white gouache, each of them revising and amplifying the last.99 Like Les Fugitifs, the Ashmolean L’Émeute has been built up, its image gradually discovered through the application and reapplication of marks and washes, in the to-and-fro of figuration and obliteration, work and rework. Here, however, the pull of disintegration looks to have been irresistible. It is the cataclysmic destruction of the world itself that we are made to see, the ground—a city, a road, the coherence of civil and social life—in the process of its annihilation. On one point art historians have tended to agree: there is no precedent for the Ashmolean L’Émeute in Daumier’s œuvre. Insofar as the distinction pertains to the drawing’s appearance, I am willing to take my place in line. Clearly Daumier has ( 140 )  the revolution takes for m

departed from old habits. The violence of the drawing’s handling and its image puts L’Émeute in previously uncharted if not altogether alien territory—it was Préault’s and, for a brief moment in the summer of 1848, it was Meissonier’s. Until then, Daumier’s vision of revolution, even in the dark days after April 1834, had nowhere ceded so much ground to despondency. The handling is decisive. What distinguishes the Ashmolean L’Émeute is its touch. In it, the need for progress appears inextricable from its impossibility. The Ashmolean L’Émeute shows us what a revolution with no future might look like: above, a deserted cityscape in flames, hollowed out, a ruin in the making; below, a deadly crush, countless “révolutionnaires” stripped of clothing, their faces hardened into grotesque, otherworldly masks, their physical exertion extreme yet powerless against the crowd’s inexorable momentum. The few who do resist the surge have been locked into one or another pose. These men—I see no women or children among them, no families or future generations, no one to remember—flee the cataclysm only to descend toward the seventh circle of hell. Forward and downward have come to indicate the same direction, and downward looks to be the sole option. I have found no equivalent in Daumier’s œuvre for the drawing’s top-to-bottom organization, its division into registers stacked one on top of the other and pressing ever downward, its reimagining of cardinal direction. Broadly speaking, the firmness of a ground level, a horizontal on which the living stand and the dead lie, determines the orientation of his compositions and affirms the inviolable order of the natural world. In the Ashmolean L’Émeute, that absoluteness, that limit condition of human action and therefore human world, has become suspect. Daumier nowhere comes as close to Préault—to the groundlessness of Tuerie—as he does here. Simply replace Préault’s spirited negativity with Daumier’s downcast eyes.

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• Afterword suis Pas / Pour le fini / Je suis Pour l’infini” (I am Not / For the finite / I am “JeForne the infinite). Préault scrawled this tercet of lines beneath a sketch of the

commemorative medallion he modeled of Eugène Delacroix in 1864 (fig. 61), the year after the painter’s death. Neither caesural commas nor terminal periods separate its three clauses. Préault has replaced punctuation with capitalized Js and Ps—“Je,” “Pas,” “Pour.” In turn, the tercet acquires an emphatic cadence. It sounds like a slogan. On the page, however, it resembles an epitaph. The affect presented by Préault’s gnomic declaration is ambiguous. It professes a conviction of long standing—Préault could easily have written the three lines in 1830, 1832, 1834, or even in the first few months of 1848—as an expression of bereavement, in defiance, as it were, of the death it grieves.1 This experience of loss and mourning has triggered a kind of recursion. The promise (re)articulated by the tercet remains unfulfilled. Past meets future.2 “Fini” carries two connotations. On the one hand, it refers to “finish” and everything this term implies about an artist’s relation to academic practice, the art market, and the conditions of artistic production.3 In this first sense, “fini” confirms a positivist criterion, which nonetheless consolidates its authority by means of abstraction. It privileges exogenous standards of value over production itself, over the individual work of art, which, alienated by a regulated system of artistic labor, can never truly achieve its own concept. “Fini” encodes its social meaning. On the other hand, “fini” designates objective, untransgressable limits in time and space, the restrictedness of human experience—“finitude.” These two aspects of “fini” ought to be read in tandem; they complement one another. “Fini” assimilates the historical to the natural. It naturalizes history and historicizes nature. It marks a place and time where life and possibility wither away. As the measure of an artwork’s resolution—of its completedness—“fini” signals “the end,” but an end already—which is to say, arbitrarily—determined. That “fini” is a past participle acting as a noun is therefore not without significance. “Fini”

Fig. 61  Auguste Préault, Eugène Delacroix, 1864. Brown ink on papier bistre, 16.6 × 12.5 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York.

solidifies the boundary between the work of art and lived experience; it circumscribes the work of art. Individual labor is thus made into an object of tradition—that is, placed at the disposal of the present. Transmission, exchange, and consignment to oblivion consequently become so many means to the same (dead) end. Seldom given over to the formalities of surface appearance, “infini” enacts rather than veils its social meaning. It besieges the positivism of its counterpart; it favors the unknown and unknowable over control and mastery; it values what remains absent, unforeseeable, beyond the reach of instrumental or practical reason. As negation, “infini” is imperious. It admires “nothing.” (Some would say it is sublime.) After writing these lines, Préault signed them: “Je ne suis Pas / Pour le fini / Je suis Pour l’infini / Auguste Préault.” Rather than secure the priority of Préault’s authorship, the signature sabotages it. For even as the signature names Préault as the writer of the lines above, it unmoors them from a coherent and autonomous—hence authorial— voice. Whether we are to understand “je” as Préault himself or as Delacroix remains unclear. Is Préault proclaiming his own desire, or what he believes to have been Delacroix’s? Is he signing the tercet above, the drawing as a whole, or both? Or is “je” in fact divided, an identification of self and other, maybe even self as other, both Préault and Delacroix? “Préault c’est Delacroix”: the equation was commonplace by the late 1840s.4 The sketch of the medallion provides no assurances one way or the other: like the lines dashed off below it, the ink drawing demands that we read two registers at once—in this case, mediums. Neither does chronology. The best we can do is date both the sketch and the medallion to 1864. We cannot say for certain, however, which came first. In other words, we do not know whether the sketch is preparation or reproduction, whether it is drawing in advance of sculpture or drawing after sculpture. There is no true way to understand the repetition. Préault signed the medallion in the picture, an indication of its completion, just as he signed the sketch and the tercet below. The inclination of Préault’s drawing toward integration ultimately dismantles the claim to it. In the drawing, the work of art appears finite; at the same time, it refuses to postulate an end. By this I do not mean that Préault simply sets open-endedness over and against its opposite. Unboundedness in the drawing visualizes “infini” as dialectical movement. Loss is thereby transfigured, returning as a sign of reparation. The drawing rescues the past it mourns. In so doing, however, Préault’s drawing reveals what it cannot be: it attests to its belatedness. Seen from this angle, Préault’s drawing shares much with Daumier’s L’Émeute. Both of them disinter. The disillusion that structures L’Émeute’s relation to its past does not, however, appear to trouble Préault’s drawing. L’Émeute mistrusts its past; it wonders whether this past was itself ever fully present or accessible. Préault’s drawing, conversely, perseverates, repeating its atavistic cri de cœur unchanged as if to affirm the indeterminacy of language and experience.

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Préault risks regression. He defends the language of 1830 against the material reality of a present that, in the drawing, all but vanishes. To many, this once radical language had in the intervening years become unrecognizable, “une langue inconnue.”5 The ground had shifted. “New Paris,” with its widened streets and long vistas, was designed by Haussmann to secure the city against insurrection; by the mid-1860s, this strategy was plain for everyone to see. Barracks had gone up at the major crossroads. The southern section of the Canal Saint-Martin, between the remodeled place du Château d’Eau (after 1879, place de la République) and place de la Bastille, was covered over, thus depriving the faubourg Saint-Antoine of its moatlike line of defense. In 1866, rue de Turbigo erased rue Transnonain from the map of Paris. Brute force was only an instrument, however, the semblance of imperial will and power: “Haussmann gave himself the title of ‘demolition artist.’ ”6 Roughly 20 meters wide and 1,165 meters long, rue de Turbigo connected place du Château d’Eau, with its star-shaped array of large avenues and Prince-Eugène barracks, in a straight line with the new Halles centrales. In this way rue de Turbigo was emblematic: it coordinated the unimpeded movement of Napoléon III’s army with the accelerating rate of commercial production.7 “Infini,” in 1864, meant more and less than it did in 1830. It had been conscripted by the law of endless compound growth. “Je ne suis Pas / Pour le fini / Je suis Pour l’infini / Auguste Préault.” The hope Préault seizes in defending the language of 1830 turns out to be an impossible hope. As activity, rescue occurs post lapsum. It holds the future open. But it does not—indeed, cannot—avoid the transformations of time and space. Successfully rescued objects or phenomena survive as something other than merely themselves.8 That is, rescue preserves the non-self-identical in them. To rescue also means that one surrenders. So much more poignantly, then—so much more punctually—does Préault’s tercet perform its commemorative function. It confesses.

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Notes Preface 1. Engels, introduction to Marx’s Class Struggles in France, 9. 2. Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 35; Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, 63. Early misreadings of Engels’s aims can be attributed to what he called the “disgraceful impression” that appeared in 1895, first in Vorwärts (March 30) and Die Neue Zeit (vol. 2, nos. 27–28) and then in the reprint of Marx’s book. Prior to publication, references to future armed struggles were excised from the introduction without Engels’s consent. The full version remained unpublished until the mid-1930s. 3. Engels, introduction to Class Struggles in France, 13. 4. On the barricade as “repertoire of collective action,” a concept originating in the work of Charles Tilly, see Traugott, “Barricades as Repertoire.” 5. Engels, introduction to Class Struggles in France, 23. 6. P.-J. Proudhon produced a nearly identical account of the barricade after the February Days of 1848: “Le succès d’une insurrection ne dépend pas, comme on s’imagine, d’une bataille véritable; il provient surtout, et même uniquement, de la généralité et de la rapidité du mouvement. Pour obtenir cet effet, il s’agit donc d’occuper la troupe sur quelques points, de la faire courir après l’émeute de barricade en barricade, pendant que l’on en élève partout; et puis, quand l’impulsion première a entraîné tout le monde, que la ville est sens dessus dessous, l’armée réfléchit, hésite.” Proudhon, Correspondance, 2:282–83. 7. In his recent account of “the poetics of the barricade,” Jason Frank describes the barricade as a site of “collective political subjectivization and a resonant historical manifestation of the democratic sublime.” See Frank, Democratic Sublime, 123–51. The phrase “poetics of the barricade” comes from Pierre Rosanvallon (Democratic Legitimacy, 126). 8. Engels, introduction to Class Struggles in France, 11, 23. 9. See Deutscher, Prophet Armed, 138. 10. Engels, introduction to Class Struggles in France, 16.

11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. See Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, esp. 1–31, 61–88. 15. Engels, introduction to Marx’s Civil War in France, 18; Marx, “Marx to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, 46:66; Lissagaray, Histoire de la Commune de 1871, 199–200. 16. Only a single picture of the barricade, at least that I know of, predates the Revolution of 1830, an engraving of 1648 that depicts a row of barriques, reinforcements for the chain stretched before them, prohibiting passage through the Porte Saint-Antoine. On the long history of the barricade as tactic and its dissemination throughout Europe, see Traugott, Insurgent Barricade, which includes a database of barricade events between 1569 and 1900. Traugott’s book is the most comprehensive history of the barricade we have, in French or English. See also the collection of essays in Corbin and Mayeur, La Barricade. This volume covers a wide range of barricade-related matters, including the barricade’s invention and deployment up until the end of the twentieth century, the social composition of barricade fighters, the iconography of the barricade in the nineteenth century, and the barricade’s place in language, literature, and culture. Hazan’s History of the Barricade, although more episodic than the others as well as more specific in its geography (mostly Paris, some Lyons), is also helpful. The classic account of the barricades in the mid-nineteenth century is Duveau, 1848, 161–81. 17. “Marx to [Louis] Watteau,” in Marx/Engels Collected Works, 41:326. 18. Gerhard Richter coined the term “afterness” to address a central figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity, “that of following, coming after, having survived, outlived, or succeeded something or someone.” Theodor Adorno’s “after Auschwitz” and Aby Warburg’s “Nachleben” (afterlife, survival) are among the most well-known examples. See ­Richter, Afterness, 2.

Introduction 1. Michelet, Le Peuple, 100. 2. In the aftermath of the 1830 revolution, the short-lived worker’s journal L’Artisan put it this way: “Les bourgeois résistèrent en invoquant la légalité; les ouvriers, eux, s’armèrent, en invoquant la liberté.” L’Artisan, October 10, 1830. 3. The right of insurrection was enshrined in article 35 of the Constitution of June 24, 1793: “Quand le gouvernement viole les droits du peuple, l’insurrection est, pour le peuple et pour chaque portion du peuple, le plus sacré des droits et le plus indispensable des devoirs.” Massimiliano Tomba includes the right of insurrection among what he calls “insurgent natural rights.” See Tomba, Insurgent Universality, esp. 33–36. 4. Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, 17. 5. Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, 98. 6. Ibid., 9. 7. Ibid., 92. 8. I owe the point, and much of the phrasing, to Hayden White. Mine is a specific instance of his general conclusion. See White, Metahistory, 150. 9. Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, 99. 10. See Carroll, “Art of the People,” esp. 123–24. 11. Hugo, “Dicté après juillet 1830,” in Œuvres complètes, 5:12. 12. The quoted phrases are Hugo’s (ibid., 11). 13. Nathalie Jakobowicz brought this pamphlet to my attention. See her 1830, 193. Hers is the most comprehensive account we have of “the people” in 1830. 14. Michelet, Histoire de France, 7:253. 15. Michelet, Le Peuple, 102. 16. Rancière, Aux bords du politique, 234. 17. Giorgio Agamben’s short essay “What Is a People?” is especially helpful in thinking through this relation. See his Means Without End, 28–32. 18. Ernesto Laclau describes “the people” as “essentially catachrestical.” Laclau, On Populist Reason, 72. 19. On “the people,” appearance, and assembly, see Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory, esp. 66–98. Frank’s Democratic Sublime, from beginning to end, is also essential and brings many of Butler’s concerns to bear on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political history and theory. 20. Michelet, Le Peuple, 101–2. On Michelet and the bourgeoisie, see Maza, Myth of the French Bourgeoisie, 176–79. 21. Ibid., 199. 22. Walter Benjamin synthesizes his understanding of “wish-image” in a line from Michelet: “Every epoch dreams the one that follows it.” See Benjamin,

( 148 )  Notes to Pages 1–17

“Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century ,” in Arcades Project, 4–5. 23. Michelet, Journal, 2:23. 24. See Alain Pauquet, “Les Représentations de la barricade,” in Corbin and Mayeur, La Barricade, esp. 100–103, 106–7. 25. M. Rousseau, La Vie et l’œuvre, 226. 26. Schoelcher, “Notes sur le Salon de 1831,” ­L’Artiste 1 (1831): 228. 27. The first quoted phrase comes from Schoelcher, the second from Ambroise Tardieu (Annales, 224). 28. Barthélémy Hauréau, “Coup d’oeil cynique sur l’exposition,” Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle 33 (1831): 482. 29. In an unpublished letter to his brother Charles, dated October 12, 1830, Delacroix wrote: “J’ai entrepris un sujet moderne, une barricade, et si je n’ai pas vaincu pour la patrie, au moins peindrai-je pour elle.” Quoted in Toussaint, “La Liberté guidant le peuple” de Delacroix, 7–8. 30. The seminal account of Liberté’s critical reception and the ideological conflict staged in and around the picture is Hadjinicolaou’s “ ‘La Liberté guidant le peuple’ de Delacroix,” 3–26. See also Marrinan, Painting Politics, 67–76, and Grigsby, “Liberty’s Fragmented Body.” 31. Planche, Salon de 1831, 233; Hauréau, “Coup d’oeil cynique,” 482; Schoelcher, “Notes sur le Salon de 1831,” 228. 32. It is worth noting that, for Michelet, Géricault’s Radeau represents the “ferocious emergence of the people.” “How noble they are,” his journal entry of September 6, 1845, continues, “after the Revolution and Empire, gesturing to the future!” On the relation between Géricault’s paintings and the development of Michelet’s core concepts, see Hannoosh, Jules Michelet, 121–57. 33. Anon., “Salon de 1831,” Le Courrier de l’Europe, July 13, 1831. 34. Anon., “Tableaux de juillet,” Journal des artistes, May 15, 1831, 377. 35. The quoted phrases come from Nochlin, “Delacroix’s Liberty, Daumier’s Republic,” 16. Other key sources on gender and sexuality in Delacroix’s figure of Liberty include Grigsby, “Liberty’s Fragmented Body”; Pointon, Naked Authority, 59–82; and Wiseman, “Gendered Symbols.” 36. Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, 18. 37. Schoelcher, “Portraits et caractères contemporains. Eugène Delacroix,” L’Artiste 2 (1831): 179–80. 38. “Living type” is Théophile Thoré’s phrase. See Thoré’s “Artistes contemporains—M. Eugène Delacroix,” Le Siècle, February 25, 1837.

39. See Marrinan, Painting Politics, 68. 40. On the canuts rebellion of 1831, see Bezucha, Lyon Uprising of 1834, 48–72. 41. Thoré, “Artistes contemporains—M. Eugène Delacroix.” 42. In addition to Thoré, see esp. Alexandre Decamps, “Les Arts et l’industrie au dix-neuvième

siècle (2ème article),” Revue républicaine 4 ( January 1835): 192, and Adolphe-Napoléon Didron, ­“Untitled,” La Liberté 1 (August 1832): 12. 43. Stern, Histoire de la révolution de 1848, 1:7. 44. I am here borrowing Stefan Jonsson’s language, but not his timing. My June 1848 is his July 1830. See Jonsson, Brief History of the Masses, 44.

Chapter 1 1. Quoted in de Girardin, Questions de mon temps, 8:793. 2. Blanc, Histoire de dix ans, 4:216–17. 3. The final tally was 246 to 154 votes. See Collingham, July Monarchy, 147–48. 4. “Turning point” is Eric Hobsbawm’s term. See his Age of Revolution, 141. 5. For a detailed history of the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen and its to-and-fro with the July Monarchy in 1833 and 1834, see Harsin, Barricades, 65–105. 6. Vignerte was unfortunate enough to have signed a manifesto issued in October by the comité central of the Société des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen that enshrined the right of insurrection. He was sentenced to three years in prison. 7. Philipon, “Dessin,” Le Charivari, December 15, 1832. 8. Le National, June 23, 1834. 9. Le Moniteur universel, July 17, 1835. For a detailed history of the uprising in Lyons, see Bezucha, Lyon Uprising of 1834, 149–74; for Paris, see Harsin, Barricades, 84–102. 10. Blanc, Histoire de dix ans, 299. 11. Guizot, Mémoires, 3:249–50. 12. Collingham, July Monarchy, 71. 13. Quoted in Skerlitch, L’Opinion publique en France, 72. 14. Ibid. See also Benjamin, Arcades Project, 717. It was there, in Benjamin’s notes, that I first encountered the statement and Skerlitch’s response to it. 15. Quoted in Harsin, Barricades, 107. 16. Quoted in Collingham, July Monarchy, 166. 17. Ledru-Rollin, Mémoire sur les évenements, 17. 18. For a detailed account of the massacre, see Harsin, Barricades, 88–100. 19. See Butler, Force of Nonviolence, 16. 20. Arendt, On Violence, 56. 21. H. H. H., “Salon de 1834,” La Quotidienne, April 22, 1834. 22. Four months later, C-J. Traviès completed the descent to bathos illustrated by J.-J. Grandville’s L’Ordre règne à Varsovie and L’Ordre public règne aussi à Paris with L’Ordre le plus parfait règne aussi dans Lyon. See Kerr, Caricature and French Political

Culture, 76–77. Grandville’s lithographs were included, alongside Un héros de juillet, in Philipon’s 1832 review of the “best political caricatures” since the revolution. 23. Lim, “Salon de 1834,” Le Légitimiste, no. 10 (1834): 478. 24. Hauréau, “Salon de 1834,” La Tribune politique et littéraire, March 3, 1834. For a discussion of the centrality of a debate over the relationship between art and forms of government in the Salon criticism of 1834, see Shelton, “Art, Politics, and the Politics of Art,” 714–39. 25. Farcy, “Salon de 1834,” Journal des artistes, March 23, 1834, 190–91. 26. For a full history of the commission and the Hôtel de Ville program, see Chaudonneret, L’État et les artistes, 204–5; Marrinan, Painting Politics, 98–107. 27. Vernet wrote to Louis-Philippe on July 5, 1832, to explain delays in its completion. Cited in Marrinan, Painting Politics, 54, 235n158. 28. Planche, “Salon de 1834,” Revue des deux mondes, April 1, 1834, 63–64. 29. Marrinan, Painting Politics, 54. 30. Laviron, Salon de 1834, 118–19. 31. Alexandre Tardieu, “Salon de 1834,” Le Courrier français, March 11, 1834; Fabien Pillet, “Salon de 1834,” Le Moniteur universel, April 7, 1834. The quoted phrases come from Tardieu. 32. Marrinan, Painting Politics, 54. 33. Planche, “Salon de 1834,” 62–63. 34. Lenormant, “Salon de 1834,” Le Temps, March 3, 1834. 35. “La Barricade de M. Delacroix,” Alexandre Decamps noted, “est trop présente au souvenir du public pour que la comparaison ne se présente pas rapidement à l’esprit de chacun, et ne vienne pas rendre plus saillans les défauts du tableau de M. Schnetz.” See Decamps, Le Musée, 64. 36. Fabien Pillet, “Salon de 1834,” Le Moniteur universel, March 26, 1834. 37. Chaudonneret, L’État et les artistes, 205. ­Marrinan comes to a similar conclusion but emphasizes the picture’s “iconographic anachronisms” (Marrinan, Painting Politics, 107).

Notes to Pages 17–35  ( 149 )

38. On the development and ideological operations of the genre historique under the July Monarchy, see Marrinan, Painting Politics, 19–24. 39. Baudelaire, “Quelques caricaturistes français,” in Œuvres complètes, 729. “Quelques caricaturistes français” was first published in Présent on October 1, 1857. 40. Philipon, “24e dessin de la lithographie mensuelle. Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834,” La Caricature, October 2, 1834. 41. Michèle Hannoosh argues, and I think rightly, that Rue Transnonain “represents caricature at its best in the Baudelairean scheme.” See Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature, esp. 136–38. 42. The pamphlet was first published in late July. Copies sold so quickly that a second edition was required only three weeks later. 43. Le Charivari, August 4, 1834. 44. Marrinan suggests that Daumier, aware that the facts of the fourteenth were in dispute, chose the fifteenth in order to avoid the censors. See Marrinan, Romantic Paris, 360–62. 45. Marrinan and Ségolène Le Men state otherwise. See Marrinan, Romantic Paris, 362, and Le

Men’s catalogue entry for Rue Transnonain in Daumier, 1808–1879, 177–78. 46. For a counterexample, see Philipon’s explication for Ne vous y frottez pas!!: La liberté de la presse, personnifiée par un jeune et vigoureux imprimeur attend, bien campée, les attaques d’un gros et gras personnage que pousse Persil et qu’Odilon Barrot cherche à retenir. Charles X, renversé et secouru par les monarques étrangers, témoigne du sort que pourrait réserver à son nouvel adversaire le puissant athlète auquel Daumier a su donner un si beau caractère de force et d’indépendance. / Nous ne craignons pas de dire que cette planche . . . , exécutée à la manière des Anglais, d’un dessin large, ferme, et cependant plein de finesse, est un des meilleurs croquis politiques faits en France. Philipon, “Dessin du mois de mars,” La Caricature, June 8, 1834. 47. Bechtel, Freedom of the Press, 36–37.

Chapter 2 1. Tabarant, La Vie artistique, 245. 2. Banville, Mes souvenirs, 174. 3. Jean Reynaud, “Coup-d’oeil sur l’exposition de sculpture,” Revue encyclopédique, March 1833, 580. 4. Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants, 294. 5. For the standard “rules” of relief sculpture, see Griffoul-Dorval, Essai sur la sculpture en bas-relief, esp. 12–13. In brief, the main “rules” are (1) harmonize planes and figures; (2) ensure that these planes are contiguous and that none floats free from the background; (3) avoid sharp contrasts between salience and recession, projection and shadow. 6. Paul Rochery, “Salon de 1850–1851,” La Politique nouvelle, April 6, 1851, 456–57; Bruno Galbaccio, “Salon de 1834,” Le Locateur, March 1834. 7. J.-B. Hauréau, “Salon,” La Tribune politique et littéraire, May 3, 1833. 8. Maximilien Raoul, “Salon de 1834,” Le Cabinet de lecture, April 24, 1834, 7–8. For Raoul, wholesale rejection of Préault’s work in 1834 was simply a matter of decency. 9. See Decamps, Le Musée, 76–77, and Laviron, Salon de 1834, 162–64. 10. Laviron, Salon de 1834, 162. See also Galbaccio, “Salon de 1834.” The phrase “illégalité flagrante” comes from Laviron and Galbaccio’s Salon de 1833, shortly after they dub the entirety of the academic system “notre gouvernement militaire des

( 150 )  Notes to Pages 35–45

beaux-arts.” Laviron and Galbaccio, Salon de 1833, 10–11. 11. “Tout veut fuir.” Anne Pingeot, “Reliefs,” in Le Corps en morceaux, 222. 12. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin are constant presences throughout this chapter, especially Adorno’s work on the relationship between parts (the fragment) and wholes (totality), integration and disintegration (form), dissonance and harmony, and Benjamin’s work on allegory, violence, and destructiveness. Rather than cite every instance where their language and ideas have informed my own (unless quoted), which would be cumbersome, I will simply list the key sources here: Adorno, Negative Dialectics; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory; Adorno, “Form in the New Music,” 201–16; Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, 1:236–52; Benjamin, “Destructive Character,” in Selected Writings, 2:541–42; and Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama. I do not mean for this unannotated listing of books and essays to suggest that Adorno and Benjamin agreed on all of these matters. Sometimes they did; mostly they did not. If on occasion I do obscure those differences, I would like to believe it is because Tuerie has led me to do so. 13. “Archi-fantastique” is Raoul’s term (“Salon de 1834,” 7); “imprévu” is Jules Salmson’s (Entre deux coups de ciseau, 60–68). For the sharpest of these

accounts, see Charles Farcy, “L’École moderne,” Journal des artistes, July 5, 1834, 1–6, as well as his “Une Macédoine,” Journal des artistes, July 12, 1834, 17–25. 14. Laviron, Salon de 1834, 164. 15. Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants, 295. 16. Benoist, La Sculpture romantique, 116. See also Pingeot, “Reliefs,” 219–20, and Isabelle Leroy-Jay Lemaistre, “Ses œuvres sont les strophes en pierre, en marbre, en bois, du poème de la douleur humaine,” in Auguste Préault, 79–87. 17. See esp. Mower, “Antoine Augustin Préault,” 293, and Davenport, “Sources for Préault’s Tuerie,” 22–30. Mower’s account of Préault’s sources, the recipe-like formulation of which I have borrowed, is indicative. He begins with a quotation from Benoist, which addresses the relief ’s indeterminacies: “Est-ce un Massacre des Innocents ou un scène de cinquième acte de melodrame romantique?” Then comes his ingredient list, with cursory explanations. What he overlooks is Benoist’s question mark, which I take to be operative. 18. On Caravaggio’s Kiss of Judas, see Davenport, “Sources for Préault’s Tuerie,” 25–28; on Girodet’s Ossian, see Isabelle Leroy-Jay Lemaistre’s catalogue entry for Tuerie in Auguste Préault, 132. 19. Ribner, “Henri de Triqueti,” 486–501. Ribner later republished the essay in Broken Tablets, 70–97. 20. Davenport, “Sources for Préault’s Tuerie,” 25. 21. Gautier, Histoire du romantisme, 97. 22. On the thematics of contact (racial as well as bodily) in Géricault’s Radeau, the fourth chapter of Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby’s Extremities is indispensable. 23. Hugo, Hernani, 43n1. 24. C. Bataille refers to Tuerie as “cette mêlée, sans nom . . . cette mêlée de figures de toutes les races, de tous les temps, toutes humaines” (“Auguste Préault,” Diogène, January 25, 1857). 25. On how Black bodies signified in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, see Grigsby, Extremities, 8–63, and her “Cursed Mimicry,” 68–105. See also Hoffmann’s seminal account of “le nègre” as a “literary character” and “collective obsession” between 1789 and 1848 in Le Nègre romantique, esp. 147–229. 26. Boime, Hollow Icons, 50–53. 27. See Andrews, “Breaking the Ties,” 489–527. On the formation of the Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage, see Jennings, French Anti-Slavery, 24–75. 28. These two alternatives often defined critical attitudes toward sculpture in the nineteenth century. See Wagner, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, 24–27. 29. Fusco, “Allegorical Sculpture,” in Romantics to Rodin, 62.

30. See esp. ibid., 61–62. 31. Gautier, “Salon de 1834,” La France industrielle, April 1834, 22. 32. Ibid. 33. Galbaccio, “Salon de 1834.” 34. Laviron, “Progrès de nos doctrines,” La Liberté 18 ( January 1833): 133. 35. Farcy, “L’École moderne,” 3. 36. Laviron, Salon de 1834, 164. 37. On this potential of the Romantic fragment and its conceptualization, Charles Rosen’s Romantic Generation is especially helpful and foundational. See Rosen, Romantic Generation, 48–51. 38. Philippe-Auguste Jeanron, “De l’anarchie dans les arts (premier article),” La Liberté 8 (September 1832): 116. 39. Ibid., 115. 40. See also Jeanron’s “Sur l’élection de M. ­Delaroche,” La Liberté 15 (December 1832): 33–37. 41. McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness, 293. 42. Jeanron, “De l’anarchie dans les arts (2e article),” La Liberté 11 (November 1832): 166. 43. Jeanron, “De l’anarchie dans les arts (premier article),” 115. 44. Ibid., 117, 115. See also Adolphe-Napoléon Didron’s prospectus for La Liberté, 1832, 1–2, and Pétrus Borel, “Bruit que ces messieurs font courir,” La Liberté 2 (September 1832), 7. 45. See Glinoer, “À la lisière,” 213–26. 46. See, for example, Hauréau, “De la politique et des arts,” La Liberté 1 (August 1832): 26–30; Jules Raimbaud, “Union et liberté,” La Liberté 2 (August 1832): 13–16; Borel, “Exposition, Galerie Colbert. Au bénéfice des indigens,” La Liberté 1 (August 1832): 30–32. 47. On La Liberté and the politics of naturalism in the early 1830s, see McWilliam, Dreams of Happiness, 289–302. 48. Laviron, “Progrès de nos doctrines,” 132. See also Hauréau, “De la politique et des arts,” 29–30. 49. Borel, “Bruit que ces messieurs font courir,” La Liberté 2 (September 1832): 9. 50. Didron, “Untitled,” La Liberté 1 (August 1832): 11; Galbaccio, “Architecture (Troisième article sur les Travaux publics),” La Liberté 14 (December 1832): 7. 51. Gustave Planche was one of many who objected to La Liberté’s mode of address. See Planche, “École de Paris,” L’Artiste 4 (1832): 37. Laviron responded in La Liberté’s sixth issue. Laviron, “De ceux à qui notre allure ne convient pas,” La Liberté 6 (September 1832): 90–93. 52. See Laviron, “De ceux à qui notre allure ne convient pas,” 90–93. 53. Jeanron, “De l’anarchie dans les arts (premier article),” 114.

Notes to Pages 46–60  ( 151 )

54. Didron, prospectus for La Liberté, 1832, 3. See also Jeanron, “Sur l’élection de M. Delaroche,” 37. 55. Didron, “Aux artistes,” La Liberté 1 (August 1832): 19. 56. Laviron, “Progrès de nos doctrines,” 135. 57. Laviron and Galbaccio, Salon de 1833, 28; Borel, “Exposition, Galerie Colbert. Au bénéfice des indigens,” 31. 58. Didron, “Nous sommes français,” La Liberté 1 (August 1832): 22. 59. Decamps, “École de Rome (premier article),” La Liberté 15 (December 1832): 38. My emphasis. 60. Didron, “Untitled,” 5–9, and “Nous sommes français,” 25. See also Borel, “Bruit que ces messieurs font courir,” 9; Jeanron, “De l’anarchie dans les arts (premier article),” 116; Decamps, “École de Rome (premier article),” 38–45. 61. See Raimbaud, “Union et liberté,” 13–16. 62. Gautier began writing Mademoiselle de Maupin in the fall of 1833 and published its famous preface in 1834. 63. See esp. E. Delacroix, “Influence du commerce et du gouvernement dans les arts,” La Liberté 16 (December 1832): 65–68. 64. See, for instance, Godefroy Cavaignac, “Monumens Révolutionnaires,” Revue républicaine 3 (November 1834): 129–75, and Etienne Arago, “La République et les artistes,” Revue républicaine 2 ( July 1834): 14–29. 65. See Galbaccio, “Les Principes avant les hommes, actualité et nationalité de l’art en général,” La Liberté 19 (February 1833): 173–76. 66. Laviron, “Progrès de nos doctrines,” 130. 67. Didron, “Untitled,” 5. 68. According to Sylvain Bellenger, Préault was thought to have been behind many of Hauréau’s articles (“Ce gaillard-là,” in Auguste Préault, 91). Much as I would like to make a point of this, I have yet to find evidence one way or the other. See also Bruley, “Un ‘enfant du siècle’?,” 251–52. Bruley goes one step further than Bellenger: he states unequivocally that Préault was among La Liberté’s founders. Again, however, the evidence is circumstantial—in this case, Préault’s close friendship with Hauréau. 69. Thoré, “Ouverture du Casino-Paganini,” Le Siècle, November 28, 1837. 70. Préault, Jeanron, and Galbaccio were all supportive participants at the first meeting of the Assemblée des artistes on August 23, 1830. By the end of this meeting, the four hundred artists in attendance had split along political lines—on the one side, the Classiques, and on the other, the Romantiques. The more radical among the Romantiques—Thoré’s “young and audacious phalanx”—went on to form

( 152 )  Notes to Pages 60–70

the Société libre des Beaux-Arts. See M. Rousseau, La Vie et l’œuvre, 35–42. 71. On Préault’s journalism, see Charles W. Millard, “La Vie d’Auguste Préault,” in Auguste Préault, 47–48. 72. A third article, “Revue des Salons,” published anonymously in Renaissance on May 1, 1856, may also be Préault’s—it has all of the ingredients of the other two—but we cannot attribute it to him with certainty. 73. Préault, “L’Architecture du siècle,” Renaissance, March 1, 1856, 4. The “Mâcon” Préault disparages is Claude-Philibert de Rambuteau. As prefect of the Seine between 1833 and 1848, Rambuteau established the economic and ideological framework that enabled Haussmann to carry out the transformation of Paris under the Second Empire. Surely the slight is meant for Haussmann as well. 74. Préault, “La Statuaire moderne,” Renaissance, February 1, 1856, 4. 75. Ibid. 76. Laviron and Galbaccio, Salon de 1833, 30. 77. Ibid., 256–57. 78. Ibid., 40–41. 79. See also Galbaccio, “Architecture (Troisième article sur les Travaux publics),” 8. 80. Gautier, “Salon de 1834,” 22. 81. Laviron, Salon de 1834, 162. 82. Arnaud, “Une Tuerie,” 92. 83. Chesneau, “Auguste Préault,” L’Art 27, no. 2 (1879): 13. 84. Théodore de Banville, “Le Salon de 1851,” Le Pouvoir, 10 January 1851. 85. Gautier, “Salon de 1850–51,” La Presse, May 1, 1851. 86. “Je signalerai seulement, dans ce bas-relief, quelques endroits vides et des lacunes,” wrote Paul Mantz. “C’est comme si les étroites mailles du filet se brisaient” (“Le Salon,” L’Événement, April 13, 1851). Or Louis de Geofroy: “Il fait une Tuerie, fragment d’un grand bas-relief. Ne connaissant pas l’ensemble, nous ne pouvons rien comprendre à ce morceau, où se trouvent pêle-mêle entassés des têtes grimaçantes, des bras sortant on ne sait d’où, des mains qui n’appartiennent à aucun corps. Tout cela se mord, s’égratigne sans nous dire pourquoi, et produit exactement l’effet d’un cauchemar” (“Le Salon de 1850,” Revue des deux mondes, March 1, 1851, 959). 87. Méry, “Salon de 1850,” La Mode, May 17, 1851, 303. 88. Rochery, “Salon de 1850–1851,” 457. 89. Haussard, “Salon de 1850–1851,” Le National, April 11, 1851.

Chapter 3 The title of this chapter comes from Charles Baudelaire’s “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris.” The “pile” of his account is Second Empire Paris. See Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, 1067. 1. Sabatier-Ungher, Salon de 1851, 57. 2. Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, 27. See also Michel, “L’Idiot de la peinture,” 94–97. 3. Gautier, “Salon de 1850–1851,” La Presse, April 10, 1851. 4. Edgar Quinet, “Discours au collège de France,” La Réforme, March 9, 1848. Quinet, a historian, was a close confidant of Michelet. Michelet addressed his account of Le Peuple to him in 1846. 5. On the prints of 1848, see Ségolène Le Men, “Les Images de l’année 1848,” in Les Révolutions de 1848, 29–63. 6. Marx, “June Revolution,” 131. Marx’s report was originally published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung on June 29, 1848. 7. Ibid. 8. See Le Moniteur universel, February 26, 1848. 9. See Lamartine, La France parlementaire, 5:209. 10. See Amann, Revolution and Mass Democracy, 101–10. 11. Lamartine, La France parlementaire, 5:210. 12. Lamartine was clearly relying on the authority of Rousseau, and here I am drawing directly from the source. See Rousseau, On the Social Contract, in Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 233. On conceptualizations of law, unity, and citizenship in revolutionary and post-revolutionary politics, see Tomba, Insurgent Universality, esp. 35. 13. Lamartine, La France parlementaire, 5:213. See also Livesey, “Speaking the Nation,” 476. 14. On the journée of May 15, see Amann, Revolution and Mass Democracy, 205–47. 15. Proudhon, Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire, 144. 16. See Lamartine, La France parlementaire, 5:410–27. On the “organization of labor,” see Louis Blanc’s 1839 pamphlet Organisation du travail, the fifth edition of which was printed in 1848. Adolphe Thiers responded with his own treatise, De la propriété. Blanc’s retort can be found in his Le Socialisme—Droit au travail, réponse à M. Thiers. 17. Delaage, Journées de juin 1848, 11. 18. Castille, Les Massacres de juin 1848, 6. See also Delaage, Journées de juin 1848, 12. 19. Marianne Cayatte and Philippe Oulmont, “Un demi-siècle d’insurrections et de barricades,” in Becker and Candar, Histoire des gauches en France, 1:172. 20. Marx, Class Struggles in France, 56. 21. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 182.

22. Lamartine, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 2:450. 23. Hugo, Les Misérables, 6–8. 24. Schmidt, Les Journées de juin 1848, 10. See also Pardigon, Épisodes des journées de juin 1848. 25. Le Bulletin de la République, March 19, 1848. 26. Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen, 376. 27. On this paradox of democratic politics, see Honig, “Between Decision and Deliberation,” esp. 1–8. See also Frank, Democratic Sublime, 41–56. Both Honig and Frank link the paradox of democratic politics to the “lawgiver problem” in Rousseau’s Social Contract (book 2, chapter 7). 28. Ledru-Rollin, Discours politiques et écrits divers, 2:16–21. 29. Heraclitus, trans. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London: A. C. Black and Sons, 1920), 137. 30. See Ledru-Rollin, Du gouvernement direct du peuple, 5–7. 31. Proudhon, “Mystification du suffrage universel,” Le Représentant du peuple, April 30, 1848. See also Proudhon, Solution du problème social, 54–64. On democracy and disincorporation, or what Claude Lefort calls democracy’s “empty place” of power, see Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 17–18. 32. Proudhon, Solution du problème social, 69. 33. On this equation, see Julliard, “Le Peuple.” 34. Aminzade, “Between Movement and Party,” 24. 35. Blanqui, Maintenant, il faut des armes, 143. Blanqui’s affiche was first published on May 2, 1848. 36. Marx, Class Struggles in France, 54. 37. Le Bulletin de la République, May 2, 1848. 38. La Vraie République, June 24, 1848 (emphasis in original). The occasion hardly took Thoré by surprise: “Sans la réforme sociale, il n’y a point de vraie République. Si l’Assemblée n’abolissait pas bravement le prolétariat social, il faudrait continuer, au nom de l’égalité, la révolution engagée au nom de la liberté. (Est-ce clair?)” Thoré, La Vraie République, March 28, 1848. 39. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 190–91. 40. Gazette des tribunaux, June 26, 1848. 41. See Hazan, L’Invention de Paris, 381. 42. Lamartine, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 2:442. 43. Jonsson, Brief History of the Masses, 47. 44. The proclamation, which Cavaignac addressed to both the National Guard and the army on June 26, was first published in the Gazette des tribunaux on June 28, 1848. 45. In this regard, Cavaignac’s proclamation recalls Saint-Marc Girardin’s oft-quoted commentary on

Notes to Pages 71–79  ( 153 )

the canuts uprising of 1831: “Chaque fabricant vit dans sa fabrique comme les planteurs des colonies au milieu de leurs esclaves, un contre cent; et la sédition de Lyon est une espèce d’insurrection de Saint-Domingue” (Journal des débats, December 8, 1831). 46. For a particularly vivid statement to this effect, see La Réforme, July 2, 1848 (morning edition). See also Le National, June 25, 1848. 47. Marchal, Les Barricades, 4–6. 48. Hincker, Citoyens-combattants à Paris, 22. 49. See esp. “Les Barricades de l’ordre,” Le Charivari, June 28, 1848. See also the issue of June 27, in which Le Charivari expels the June insurgent from “le peuple.” 50. Of the hundred or so pictures of June street fighting stored in the de Vinck Collection at the Cabinet des Estampes, only a few stray from this regularized practice of exclusion. The same holds true for painting. 51. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 212. 52. See Fureix, “Mots de guerre civile,” esp. 23–26. 53. Hungerford, “Meissonier’s Souvenir de guerre civile,” 282–83; Kearns, Théophile Gautier, 106. 54. Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu, in Œuvres complètes, 1200. 55. Meissonier’s letter, which was published by Paul Robert in Le Matin on April 29, 1891, is now in the Louvre. 56. Hazan, Paris sous tension, 79. 57. Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, 52. 58. For Meissonier, painting and politics were analogous practices. The one, like the other, had to fit the part to the whole. See Gréard, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, 202. 59. Delacroix, Journal, 182. Delacroix held on to the watercolor until his death. At the posthumous sale of his atelier in late February 1864, Meissonier’s brother-in-law, Louis Steinheil, purchased it for 3,000 francs, after which he presented it to the Louvre, but Frédéric Reiset, curator of paintings, drawings, and prints, refused to buy it. Steinheil then sold it to Arthur Stevens, Alfred’s brother, for 6,000 francs. The watercolor remained in private hands until the musée d’Orsay acquired it in 1997. 60. Gautier, “Salon de 1850–1851.” 61. Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, 54. 62. Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, 28. 63. Gautier, “Salon de 1849,” La Presse, Auguste 8, 1849. Gautier appears to have seen Souvenir de

guerre civile around the time Meissonier decided to withdraw it. He titles the painting La Rue and explains that at the time it remained unfinished. 64. Marx, “June Revolution,” 132. 65. Stern, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 2:401. 66. Schmidt, Les Journées de juin 1848, 53; see also Stern, Histoire de la Révolution de 1848, 2:384. Nearly every major newspaper I consulted reported some version of this encounter. 67. On Arago’s petition, see Thomas Bouchet, Le Roi et les barricades, 37. 68. Oehler, Le Spleen contre l’oublie, 85. 69. Sartre, L’Idiot de la famille, 3:398. Oehler, too, takes this passage as his point of departure. I owe my familiarity with it to him. 70. Ménard, Prologue d’une révolution, 260. 71. Ibid., 259. 72. Gallois, Histoire de la révolution de 1848, 3:203. 73. Marx, “June Revolution,” 133. 74. Ibid. 75. Pardigon, Épisodes des journées de juin 1848, 205. 76. Marx, “June Revolution,” 130. 77. Proudhon, Carnets, 3:67. 78. Blanqui, Critique sociale, 2:96. 79. Déjacque, “La Fraternité, c’est le fratricide,” in Seiler, Das Complot vom 13. Juni 1849, 96. 80. Blanqui, Critique sociale, 2:96. 81. Ibid. The emphasis is Blanqui’s, who also wrote this phrase from Darwin in English. 82. Pillon, “Le Socialisme d’Auguste Blanqui,” 68. 83. Blanqui, Critique sociale, 2:96. 84. Oehler, Le Spleen contre l’oublie, 78. 85. Thierry, “Salon de 1851,” L’Assemblée nationale, March 21, 1851. 86. Ibid. 87. Méry, “Salon de 1850,” La Mode, January 5, 1851, 160–61. 88. Sabatier-Ungher, Salon de 1851, 56–57. His passages on Meissonier were originally published in La Démocratie pacifique on January 26 and February 16. 89. J.-J. Arnoux, “Salon de 1850–1851,” La Patrie, April 1, 1851. 90. Weiss, L’Esthétique de la résistance, 2:46. 91. Alfred Dauger, “Salon de 1851,” Le Pays, February 14, 1851. 92. Peisse, “Salon de 1850–1851,” Le Constitutionnel, March 2, 1851. 93. Lamartine, Œuvres complètes, 38:380.

Chapter 4 Two texts warrant noting straightaway: Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future and T. J. Clark’s

( 154 )  Notes to Pages 80–91

“For a Left with No Future.” Both are fundamental throughout this chapter, as much for the questions

they raise as the responses they go on to develop. The epigraphs for this chapter, in addition to its title, come from Arendt. 1. Baudelaire, “La Beauté du Peuple,” Le Salut public, February 27, 1848. 2. Baudelaire, “Au Peuple,” Le Salut public, February 27, 1848. 3. Burton, Baudelaire and the Second Republic, 108–10. 4. Baudelaire, “Assommons les pauvres!,” in Œuvres complètes, 349. 5. The phrase “illusion lyrique” comes from Philippe Vigier’s La Seconde République. 6. Baudelaire, “Pétrus Borel,” in Œuvres complètes, 1099. 7. Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu, 1200. 8. On May 31, 1850, the National Assembly passed an electoral law that pegged voting rights to the duration of one’s residency at a current address. The effect was mass disenfranchisement, particularly among the working classes. Louis-Napoléon’s coup lifted this restriction. 9. Baudelaire, Correspondance, 1:188. 10. Ibid., 189. 11. Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu, 1200. 12. Ibid., 1211. 13. Sanyal, Violence of Modernity, 77. 14. Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu, 1200–1201. 15. Baudelaire, Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires, xii. 16. Baudelaire, “Argument du livre sur la belgique,” in Œuvres complètes, 1298. 17. Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu, 1214. 18. Klein, “Baudelaire and Revolution,” 90. 19. The dictum appears on a drawing of Baudelaire Nadar executed in preparation for his Panthéon Nadar (1854). 20. Baudelaire, “Le Gâteau,” in Œuvres complètes, 293–95. My reading of “Le Gâteau” is indebted to three others: Oehler, Le Spleen contre l’oublie, 320–34; Sanyal, Violence of Modernity, 90; Meltzer, Seeing Double, 21–30. 21. Michelet, L’Étudiant, 119–39. 22. Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu, 1201. 23. Baudelaire, Correspondance, 1:188. 24. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 9. 25. The formula is David Harvey’s. See Harvey, Rebel Cities, 4. 26. Howard Vincent put it this way: “No one knows when [L’Émeute] was painted; the subject allows a wide nomination of possible dates, from the Glorious Revolution of 1830, the 1848 revolution, the bloody days of June 1848, and the coup d’état of 1851, to the holocaust of the 1871 Commune” (Daumier and His World, 133). At the 1999– 2000 retrospective, L’Émeute was given the date

ca. 1852–58. The Phillips Collection, although part of that exhibition, continues to use the date 1848 (or later). 27. Laughton, Honoré Daumier, 67–68. 28. See Melot, Daumier, l’art et la République. The political use (and abuse) of Daumier over the years is Melot’s principal subject. An earlier and shorter version of Melot’s core argument can be found in his essay “Daumier and Art History.” 29. Maison, Honoré Daumier, 1:193. 30. I would like to thank Elizabeth Steele, head conservator at the Phillips, for sharing her notes, as well as her final report, with me. 31. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in Selected Writings, 2:454. Beatrice Hanssen’s Walter Benjamin’s Other History has been an invaluable resource, esp. 114–26. 32. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in Selected Writings, 1:340. 33. Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” 454. 34. Letter to Daumier dated March 30, 1851. Michelet, Correspondance générale, 6:719. 35. Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature moderne, 102. 36. On the competition, Chaudonneret’s La Figure de la République is indispensable, not only for the historical and iconographical detail of its account but also for the comprehensive collection of documents it reprints. Boime’s “Second Republic’s Contest for the Figure of the Republic” is similarly critical. For a richer discussion of the politics surrounding the competition, see Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, esp. 63–69. See also Georgel’s 1848, which addresses the “new” as a political and iconographical problem facing the concurrents. My discussion of the competition and Daumier’s place in it relies a great deal on all four. 37. On the historical development and transformation of representations of the Republic, Maurice Agulhon’s Marianne au combat (1979) remains an essential resource. 38. Duranty, “Daumier (2e et dernier article),” 543–44. 39. Banville, Mes souvenirs, 166. 40. Duranty, “Daumier (2e et dernier article),” 534. 41. Cited in L’Artiste 1 (1848): 112. 42. Delécluze, “Concours national,” Journal des débats, May 2, 1848. 43. Haussard, “Figure de la République,” Le National, May 1, 1848. 44. Thoré, La Vraie République, May 2, 1848. 45. Laurent Jan, “Portrait de la République,” Le Siècle, November 27, 1848. 46. Delécluze, “Concours national.” 47. Jan, “Portrait de la République”; Delécluze, “Concours national.”

Notes to Pages 91–116  ( 155 )

48. Mantz, “Concours pour la Figure de la République,” La Vraie République, June 18, 1848. 49. Ibid. 50. Champfleury, “Revue des Arts et des Ateliers,” Le Pamphlet, September 3–6, 1848. The slight against Thoré and the newspaper he founded in March—La Vraie République—belies the cynicism symptomatic of the political reorientations that crystallized in the après-juin. Champfleury wrote these lines in September. By then, La Vraie République had succumbed to the reaction (it was one of the papers Cavaignac shut down), and Thoré, threatened with arrest, had gone underground. 51. Mantz, “Concours pour la Figure de la République.” 52. “No sucklings, these!” Linda Nochlin found the result—an image, she says, of aggression above all—deeply “disturbing” (Representing Women, 53). 53. Anon., “Figure symbolique de la République,” L’Artiste 1 (1848): 109. 54. Haussard, “Concours d’esquisses peintes,” Le National, June 8, 1848. 55. See also Michelet’s account of Andrea del Sarto’s picture in La Femme, 180–89. 56. Mantz, “Concours pour la Figure de la République.” 57. Ibid. For an illuminating discussion of the doubleness of Daumier’s iconography and struggle to bring the Republic and Charity together into a viable symbol, see Georgel, 1848, 49–56. 58. Gautier, “Exposition des Figures du concours pour la République,” La Presse, December 5, 1848. 59. Champfleury, “Salon de 1849,” in Œuvres posthumes, 178. 60. Cited in Adhémar, Honoré Daumier, 37. There is some question about the picture to which this anonymous critic is referring. Adhémar says Une foule. Michael Pantazzi, however, says Camille Desmoulins au Palais-Royal, suggesting that, in 1878, the latter was frequently mistaken for a painting (Daumier 1808–1879, 253). We have no way of knowing for sure. 61. Adhémar, Honoré Daumier, 117. 62. On La Commune de Paris, see Wallon, La presse de 1848, 12–13, 127. 63. Adhémar, Honoré Daumier, 117. 64. Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, 23. 65. Tocqueville, Souvenirs, 221. 66. Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:452. 67. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 212. 68. Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, 2:451–55. Accordingly, Tocqueville titled the concluding chapter from which I have drawn these quotations “Vue générale du sujet.”

( 156 )  Notes to Pages 116–137

69. Hannoosh, Baudelaire and Caricature, 5. I address this aspect of Daumier’s imagery in greater detail in “Daumier and Method,” 85–100. 70. Baudelaire, “De l’essence du rire,” in Œuvres complètes, 706. 71. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 325. 72. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 175. See also Jameson, Brecht and Method, 123–24. 73. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 206. 74. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 15. 75. Ibid. 76. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” 134. I take the shift from “comedy” to “farce” to be a matter of precision rather than meaning. 77. Benjamin, Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 57. My emphasis. 78. Agamben, Man Without Content, 110. 79. Arendt, Human Condition, 9. 80. Benjamin, “Object: Triangle,” in Selected Writings, 1:90. 81. Adhémar, Honoré Daumier, 36. 82. Mather, “Painting from Dan to Beersheba,” 78. 83. Phillips, Nation’s Great Paintings, n.p. 84. Alexandre, “Unpublished Daumier,” 144. 85. Phillips, Nation’s Great Paintings, n.p. 86. Alexandre, “Unpublished Daumier,” 144. 87. Phillips, Nation’s Great Paintings, n.p. 88. Ibid. 89. Adorno, here responding to the 1935 version of “Paris, the Capital of the Nineenth Century,” took Michelet’s motto as the proposition around which the undialectical motifs in Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image crystallized. He offered Benjamin this “corrective.” See “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on the Essay ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’ ” in Selected Writings, 3:54–58. 90. Fried, “Thomas Couture,” esp. 38–43; see also Grigsby, Extremities, 235. 91. Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” 67. 92. Benoist, La Sculpture romantique, 206. 93. Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 13. 94. My thoughts here on the relation between figure and ground as well as between ground plane and ground line are indebted to several sources: Podro, Depiction, 29–59; Podro, Manifold in Perception, 80–91; Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, 13–21; Clark, “Painting at Ground Level”; Arendt, Human Condition, 199–207; and Arendt, “We Refugees.” 95. Catalogue des tableaux modernes, aquarelles, pastels, dessins, sculptures, objets d’art, composant la collection de M. Arsène Alexandre (Paris, 1903), no. 129. 96. Une barricade qui vient d’être atteinte is Adhémar’s (“Les esquisses sur la Révolution de 1848,”

42–45). The source of La Destruction de Sodome remains uncertain, though, on the word of Percy Moore Turner, it is often thought to be Alexandre. Jon Whiteley lists the drawing as The Destruction of a City in his catalogue of the Ashmolean’s drawings (French School, 329–30).

97. Laughton, Drawings of Daumier and Millet, 49–50; Hofmann, Daumier et l’Allemagne, 25. 98. Clark, Absolute Bourgeois, 117. 99. See Laughton, Drawings of Daumier and Millet, 49–50.

Afterword 1. Silvestre records many other of Préault’s characteristic statements from over the years, the most well-known of which is also the one that most closely resembles the tercet of 1864: “Je hais l’inertie, l’ineptie, les platitudes consacrées; j’adore le feu, le mouvement, la liberté et je cherche à m’élever de la boue aux étoiles.” Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants, 285–86. 2. “A mourning being,” Wendy Brown writes, “also learns a new temporality, one in which past meets future without moving through a present . . . yet also one in which the future is unmoored from parts of the past, thus puncturing conceits of linearity with a different way of living time.” W. Brown, Edgework, 100. 3. The classic account of “finish” in nineteenthcentury French painting is Rosen and Zerner, ­“Ideology of the Licked Surface,” in Romanticism and Realism, 205–32.

4. See Bellenger’s catalogue entry on the drawing in Auguste Préault, 214–15. The configuration here is Bellenger’s synthesis of any number of comparable formulations from the period, several of which he quotes. 5. Paul Mantz, “Salon de 1863,” Gazette des beaux-arts, July 1863, 55. 6. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century ,” 12. 7. In addition to Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the vital resources here are Gaillard, Paris, La Ville (1852–1870), Harvey, Paris, Capital of ­Modernity, and Clark, Painting of Modern Life, 23–78. 8. “Nothing,” Adorno says, “can be rescued unchanged.” See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 391–92. See also Richter, Afterness, 81–87. By and large I’m here following Richter’s reading of Adorno.

Notes to Pages 137–145  ( 157 )

Bibliography Newspapers, Periodicals, and Reviews L’Art L’Artisan, journal de la classe ouvrière L’Artiste L’Assemblée nationale Le Bulletin de la République Le Cabinet de lecture La Caricature Le Charivari La Commune de Paris Le Constitutionnel Le Courrier de l’Europe Le Courrier français La Démocratie pacifique Diogène L’Événement La France industrielle Gazette des tribunaux Journal des artistes Le Légitimiste La Liberté, journal des arts Le Locateur Le Mercure du dix-neuvième siècle

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Index Italicized page references indicate illustrations. Endnotes are referenced with “n” followed by the endnote number. abolitionism, 52 See also Societé française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage Académie Suisse, 42 Adhémar, Jean, 123, 131 Adorno, Theodor, 42, 131 Alexandre, Arsène, 107, 131, 137 Ancelle, Narcisse, 100, 103 Arago, Etienne, 61 Arago, François, 91–92 Arendt, Hannah, 28, 104, 137 army, French, 27, 75, 91–92, 145 L’Artiste, 114, 119 Assemblée des Artistes, 60 L’Association mensuelle lithographique, 36 Bank of France, x–xi Banville, Théodore, 113, 127 Barbier, Auguste, 46, 50 Iambes, 48 barricades fighting on, 73–74 history of, x of the June Days of 1848, 76, 80 lithographs of, 8 paintings of, 8 structure of, 6 theory of, ix–xii, 4 and universal suffrage, 80–82 visual record of, xi, 3, 6–18 Bastille. See Paris, place de la Bastille bataille d’Hernani, 48 Baudelaire, Charles, 99–1, 103–4, 127–28 “Le Gâteau,” 103 Mon coeur mis à nu, 101–2 “Quelques caricaturists français, 35–38, 40 Baume, Joseph, and Charles Mozin, Attaque de ­l’Hôtel de Ville, 13 Bayre, Antoine, 44 Beaumont, Édouard, and Eugène Cicéri, Barricade de la rue Clovis, 79, 80 Bedeau, Marie-­Alphonse, 91–92

Bellangé, Hippolyte Eh ben, as tu touché Jean Louis?, 8 Eh bien oui . . . !, 1–3, 2, 4 est de deux! . . . , 8 Seulement de l’eau rougie, 7 Benjamin, Walter, 110, 129 See also citation, theory of Benoist, Luc, 46, 132 Blanc, Charles, 62 See also Gazette des beaux-­arts Blanc, Louis, 21, 128 Blanqui, Auguste, 77, 94–95 Instructions pour une prise d’armes, xi Bonapartists, 71, 100 See also Napoléon I (Napoléon Bonaparte) bonnet rouge, 16, 25, 114 Bonvin, François, 113 Borel, Pétrus, 59 Bosredon, M. L., Ça c’est l’ennemi due dehors, 80, 81 Bourbon Monarchy, 1, 27, 73–74 Breffort, Charles, 28 Buonarotti, Philippe, Histoire de la Conspiration pour l’Égalité dite de Babeauf, 58 Caravaggio, The Kiss of Judas, 47 caricature, 21, 28, 40–41, 110, 127–28, 129 See also Le Charivari; Daumier, Honoré; ­Philipon, Charles Caricature, La, 36 Casino-­Paganini, Paris, 62 Caussidière, Marc, 128 Cavaignac, Eugène, 78, 79, 96, 110 Cavaignac, Godefroy, 61 censorship, 21, 27, 41, 74, 111 See also stamp tax Chamber of Deputies, 1, 20–22, 25, 27 Champfleury ( Jules François Felix Fleury-­Husson), 116–18, 119, 121, 123 Char, René, 99 Charivari, Le, 38, 110, 112 Souvenirs des journées de juin, 79 Charles X, 1, 3, 29–30

Charlet, Nicolas-­Toussaint, L’Allocution, 6–8, 9 Charter, 1–3, 21, 27 La Charte ou la mort, 1–3, 4 Chesneau, Ernest, 70 citation, theory of, 110 See also Benjamin, Walter; Daumier, Honoré: L’Émeute (painting) class conflict, 3–6, 18, 73–74, 76–77, 91–92, 98, 111 See also Engels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl: Class Struggles in France; people, the classicism, 44, 66, 68, 119 clubs, political (Paris), 78 May 15, 1848 protest of, 75, 77, 100 colonies, French, 6, 75, 79, 125 Colonne de Juillet, 21, 24 colporteurs, 21 Comédie-­Française, 48 Commune de Paris (newspaper), 123 Constituent Assembly, 77 Corsaire, Le, 113 Cortot, Jean-­Pierre, 44–45 coup d’etat of 1851, 100, 101, 103–4 See also Louis-­Napoléon (Napoléon III) Courbet, Gustave, 113 Courrier française, Le, 33 d’Angers, David, 63, 70 Dante (Dante Alighieri), 45, 46 Daubigny, Charles-­François, 123 Dauger, Alfred, 97 Daumier, Honoré, 42, 126–29 Les Alarmistes et les alarmés, 110 Camille Desmoulins au Palais-­Royal, 137, 139 Dernier conseil des ex-­ministres, 110, 111 Dieu mène la France, 19, 22 Les Divorceuses, 110 L’Émeute (drawing), 137–41, 138, 140, 144 L’Émeute (painting), xi–xii 104–110, 105, 121–23, 126, 127–29, 130, 131–32 composition of, 106, 124–25, 131–32 critical response to, 130–31 material construction of, 107–8, 129–30 dating of, 106 provenance of, 107 L’Épicier, 6–8, 9 Famille sur la barricade, 121–23, 122 composition of, 124–25, 131 study for, 123 Une foule, 120–23 composition of, 123–25, 131 Les Fugitifs (paintings), 132–34, 133, 134, 135 Les Fugitifs (sculptures), 132, 133, 134–37, 140, 136 Le Gamin de Paris aux Tuileries, 110, 111 Gargantua, 22–24, 113 Un héros de juilet, Mai 1831, 22–26, 23

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Histoire ancienne, 118 incarceration of, 22 La Madeleine au desert and Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, 106 Le Meunier, son fils et l’âne, 108, 109 Ouvrier et Bourgeois, 110 Ouvriers dans la rue, 108, 109 painting practice of, 107–8 Projet d’une médaille, 112–113 La République, 113–18, 117, 120–21, 127, 139 composition of, 118–19 critical response to, 119–21 “revolutionary studies” of, 121–26 (see also Daumier, Honoré: L’Émeute; Daumier, Honoré: Famille sur la barricade; Une foule) Rue Transnonain, xi–x, 35–41, 37, 42, 127–28, 139 production of, 40–41 Scène de la Révolution, 137 sculptural practice of, 137, 139 (see also Daumier, Honoré: Les Fugitifs [sculpture]) Tout est perdu! fors la caisse, 110, 111, 112 David, Jacques-­Louis, followers of (Davidians), 49, 114 Decamps, Alexandre, 55, 59 Déjacque, Joseph chanson de juin, 94 Les Lazaréennes, 94 Delacroix, Eugène, 59, 85 La Liberté guidant le people, xi–xii, 11–18, 12, 16, 19, 34, 49, 50, 90, 110, 113, 131–32 (see also Daumier, Honoré: Dernier conseil des ex-­ministres; Daumier, Honoré: Le Gamin de Paris aux Tuileries; Daumier, Honoré: Tout est perdu! fors la caisse) critical response to, 15–17 La Mort de Sardanpale, 49 See also Préault, Auguste: Eugène Delacroix Delécluze, Étienne-­Jean, 114, 116 Démocratie pacifique, 96 Deschamps, Frederick, 77 Deuchaume, Geoffroy, 132 Didron, Adophie-­Napoléon, 59, 60 Dumesnil, Alfred 62 Durand-­Ruel Galleries, 106, 123 Duranty, Edmond, 113 Duseigneur, Jehan, 44, 59 elections of 1851, 103–4 of 1852, 100 of April 1848, 74, 75, 76, 77, 100 Engels, Friedrich, foreword for Marx, Class Struggles in France, ix–xi Enlightenment, 92, 100, 102 L’Événement, 62 Executive Commission, 91

Farcy, Charles, 31–32, 57 February Revolution (1848), 18, 28, 73, 79, 99–100, 104, 107, 112, 123, 125 See also Second Republic Fieschi, Giuseppe, 27 Fleury-­Husson, Jules François Felix. See Champfleury Four Ordinances, 3 fraternité, concept of, 93–95 French Academy in Rome, 33–34 French Revolution. See Revolution of 1789 frock coat, as symbol of bourgeoisie, 19, 21, 25 Gabe, N.-­E., Prise du Panthéon, 79, 80 Galbaccio, Bruno, 57, 59, 62 Salon de 1833 (with Gabriel Laviron), 64, 67 See also Casino-­Paganini Gallois, Léonard, 93 Gautier, Théophile, 48, 55–57, 61, 70, 73, 88, 90, 121 Gazette des beaux-­arts, 62 Geoffrey de l’Asnier, rue de, 73 See also Meissonier, Ernest: Souvenir de guerre civile Géricault, Théodore, 131 Le Radeau de la Méduse, 14, 49, 50 Gigoux, Jean, after Auguste Préault, Tuerie (which see), 67–69 Girodet, Anne-­Louis, Ossian, 47–49, 48 Gomez de Silva, Don Ruy, 50 Grandville, J.-­J. L’Ordre publique règne aussi à Paris, 30 L’Ordre règne à Varsovie, 30 Greek Wars of Independence, 11 Gros, Antoine-­Jean, La Bataille d’Eylau, 49 Guizot, François, 20–21 Hauréau, Barthélémy, 11, 30–31, 59, 61 Haussard, Prosper, 70, 71, 114, 119 Haussmann, Georges-­Eugène (Baron), 28, 145 Henri V, 29–30 Hugo, Victor, 46, 48, 76 concept of “the people,” 4–5 Hernani, 48 (see also bataille d’Hernani) See also L’Événement Hungerford, Constance, 84, 88 Institut, 44–45, 57, 58–60, 64, 66 insurrection of August 10, 1792, 4 Jan, Laurent, 116 Janet, Ange-­Louis, La République, 115 Jeanron, Philippe-­Auguste, 8, 42, 59, 60, 61, 62, 70, 106 1830 and 1831, 26 “De l’anarchie dans les arts,” 58–59

Les Petits Patriotes, 8–15, 10, 18 Scène de Paris, 64, 65 Journal des artistes, 15, 60 Journal des débats, 114 July Days. See July Revolution (1830) July Monarchy, 8, 18, 21, 24, 27, 29, 31, 35, 41, 112 association with July revolution (which see), 8, 21, 22, 35 See also Bourbon monarchy; Louis-­Philippe I July revolution (1830), 3–4, 6, 19, 21–22, 32, 35, 42, 44, 62, 145 monument to (see Colonne de Juillet) June Days (1832), 22, 73 June Days (1848), x, 6, 18, 70, 71, 73–77, 78–82, 91–95, 106, 107, 116, 121, 125, 129 artistic representations of, 79–82 (see also Meissonier, Ernest, La Barricade and Souvenir de la guerre civile) juste milieu (philosophy of government), 22, 29–30 Kafka, Franz, 99 La Réforme, 74 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 75, 76, 77, 78, 98 Laughton, Bruce, 106, 108, 137 Laviron, Gabriel, 33, 58, 59, 60 Salon de 1833 (with Bruno Galbaccio), 64, 67, 68 Law of Suspects, 4 Law on Associations, 20–22, 27 Le Charivari, 19, 22 Lecomte, Hippolyte, Combat de la rue de Rohan, 13 Ledru-­Rollin, Alexandre, 94, 113–14 Mémore sur les évenements de la rue Transnonain, 38 Légion d’honneur, 25 Liberté, La, 42, 63–64 historiography of, 62 revolutionary mission of, 58–62 See also Société libre des Beaux-­Arts Lissagaray, Prosper-­Olivier, x lithography, 8, 15, 19–20, 74 See also Daumier, Honoré; stamp tax Louis XVI, 4 Louis-­Napoléon (Napoléon III), 100, 101, 110, 145 Louis-­Philippe I, 8, 19–21, 20, 24, 27, 33, 34, 112 abdication/deposition of, 74, 110 assassination attempt on, 27 Louvre, Musée du, 42, 44, 63 Luxembourg Commission, 74 Lyon, France, unrest in in 1832, 17 in 1834, 20, 26 (see also uprising of 1834) Maison Aubert, La, 22, 36, 41 Maison, K. E., 107, 108

index  ( 167 )

Mantz, Paul, 116, 119–21 Marie, Alexandre, 75–76 Martin, Henri, Histoire de France, 137 Marx, Karl, 74, 76, 91, 93 Class Struggles in France, ix “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right,’” 128–29 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 128 Maturin, Charles, 45 Meissonier, Ernest, 82–84, 140 La Barricade, 82–83, 85–86, 88, 89, 97 National Guard service of, 84–85 Souvenir de guerre civile, xi–xii, 71–73, 72, 83–84, 89–91, 90, 97–98 composition of, 86–88 critical response to, 73, 88, 90, 95–97, 98 handling of, 88–89 preparatory drawings for, 86–88, 87 Ménard, Louis, 92 Méry, Joseph, 70, 96 Michelet, Jules, 3–4, 5–6, 71, 100, 110, 131 Histoire de la Révolution Française, 1 Ministry of Public Works, 75–76 Ministry of the Interior, 113 Mobile Guards, 79, 93, 94 Mode, La, 70, 96 Moine, Antonin, 44 Moniteur universel, Le, 33 Mont de Piété, 25 Montagne, La, 128 Montmartre, quarries of, 92 Montparnasse, cemetery of, 92 Morin, Ernest, 62 Mortellerie, rue de. See Hôtel de Ville, rue de Musée royal, 17 Musée, Le (publication), 62 Musées nationaux, 70 Napoléon I (Napoléon Bonaparte), 49 Napoléon III. See Louis Napoléon National Assembly, 74, 75, 78, 100, 103 National Guard, 1–3, 6, 11, 15, 19, 27, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84, 92 National Workshops, 74–76, 77, 120 National, Le, 70 natural rights (les droits de l’homme), 3, 5, 100 See also Societé des Droits de l’Homee et du Citoyen neo-­Jacobins, 22, 61, 123 New Testament, 46 Noël, Eugène, 62 November Uprising (Polish-­Russian War, 1830–31), 29 Panthéon (Paris), 78, 79, 82 See also Gabe, N.-­E., Prise du Panthéon

( 168 )  index

Paris Commune, x–xi Paris, 74 barrière de Ménilmontant, 92–93 Canal Saint-­Martin, 145 Champs de Mars, 75, 92 École des Beaux-­Arts, 44, 116 École Militaire, 92 École Polytechnique, 1 Église Saint Étienne-­du-­Mont, 82 faubourg Saint-­Antoine, 78–79, 145 Hôtel de Ville, rue de, 84–85 Hôtel-­de-­Ville (Paris), 34, 35, 78 (see also Schnetz, Victor: Combat de l’Hôtel-­de-­Ville) Salle du Trône, 32 modernization of, x, 25, 28, 145 (see also Haussmann, Georges-­Eugène [Baron]) Notre-­Dame de, 14 pont d’Arcole, 92 Palais Bourbon, 47 Palais du Luxembourg, 75 gardens of, 92 Palais-­National, 83 Palais-­Royal, 33 Place de la Bastille, 21, 78, 79, 82, 145 place de la République (place du Châtea d’Eau), 145 place du Carrousel, 92, 95 Pont de la Concorde, 24, 25 Port Sainte-­Denis, 78, 82 Porte Saint-­Martin, 78 Turbigo, rue de (Paris), 145 See also Casino-­Paganini; Musée royale; Panthéon; Paris Commune; Transnonain, rue de; Tuileries Peisse, Louis, 97–98 Penal Code, 22, 41 “people, the,” 5–6, 15–18, 25, 27, 38, 75, 76, 77, 79, 91, 98, 100, 101, 106, 108, 124. characteristic representation of, 6 See also Hugo, Victor: concept of “the people” Périer, Casimir, 17 Philipon, Charles, 22, 36–38, 40–41 incarceration of, 22 Phillips Collection, 107 Phillips, Duncan, 131 See also Phillips Collection Phrygian cap See bonnet rouge Pillet, Fabien, 34–35 Plance, Gustave, 11, 33, 34 Pommier, Alfred, 59 Poulet-­Malassis, Auguste, 101 Pradier, James, 63 Préault, Auguste, 42–44, 47–48, 62, 70, 139, 140 “L’architecture du siècle,” 62–63 Aulus Vitellius, 112

Eugène Delacroix, 142–45, 143 Mendicité, 44, 64–65, 70 Misère, 70 Parias, 42, 56, 57, 70 Saint Valère, 63 “Le statuaire modern,” 62–63 Tuerie, xi–xii, 42–58, 43, 51, 53, 65–70, 71, 140 (see also Gigoux, Jean, after Auguste Préault, Tuerie) critical response to, 45–46, 51–52, 55–56, 57, 70 compared to Mendicité, 63–65 composition of, 54, 65–67 as fragment, 57–58 materiality of, 67, 70 title of, 45, 54–56, 57 violence in, 65–70 Presse, La, 70 Procès d’Avril, 27 Procès des Vingt-­Sept, 22 Proudhon, Pierre-­Joseph, 77, 93–94 Provisional Government of 1848, 74–76, 77 Pujol, Louis, 75–76 Quotidienne, La, review of 1834 Salon, 28, 29 Raffet, Auguste, Tirez sur les chefs et les chevaux, 7 reason, 4, 62, 94, 102–3, 125, 129 See also Enlightenment regicide, 4 See also Louis-­Philippe I: assassination attempt on Reign of Terror, 113 Renaissance, 62 Revolution of 1789, 3–4, 11, 21 See also Reign of Terror Revolution of 1848. See February Revolution; June Days of 1848 revolution, theory of, ix–xi, 101–2 See also Engels, Friedrich; Marx, Karl; people, the Reynaud, Jean, 44 Rochery, Paul, 70 Romanticism, French, 44, 46, 47 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 76 Rouen, 1848 uprising in, 77–78, 79 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 74, 76, 103 Rude, François, 63 La Marseillaise (figure of Victory), 52 Sabatier-­Ungher, François, 96–97 Saint-­Clotilde, 63 See also Préault, Auguste: Saint Valère Salon, 114 of 1831, 8, 17 of 1833, 44–45 (see also Laviron, Gabriel: Salon de 1833 [with Bruno Galbaccio]) of 1834, 28–33, 42, 58, 112

of 1848, 82, 114 of 1850, 82 of 1851, 71 Salut public, Le, 99, 103 Sarto, Andrea del, Caritas, 119–20 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 96 L’Idiot de la famille, 92 Schnetz, Victor, 34 Combat de l’Hôtel-­de-­Ville, 29, 31–33, 34–35 Schoelcher, Victor, 8, 11, 17 Scott, Walter (Sir), 46 Second Republic, 18, 74–79, 82, 94, 103, 110, 111, 125 competition to create a personification of, 113–23, 115 personification of (see Daumier, Honoré: La République; Daumier, Honoré: Les Fugitifs; Janet, Ange-­Louis: La République; Ziegler, Jules-­Claude: La République) Seine River, 24, 25, 93 Sénard, Antoine, 77, 78–79 September Laws, 27–28 Shakespeare, William, 46, 51 Othello, 48 Sieyès’s, Abbé, Qu’est-­ce que le Tiers-­État?, 123 Silvestre, Théophile, 46 slavery, 6, 74 See also abolitionism Société aide-­toi, le ciel t’aidera, 20 Societé des Droits de l’Homee et du Citoyen (SDHC), 21–22, 26–27, 61 See also Procès des Vingt-­Sept Societé française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage, 52 Société libre des Beaux-­Arts, 42 stamp tax, 21, 40–41 Stevens, Alfred, 84 suffrage, “universal,” 74, 76–77, 80, 101 See also Bosredon, M. L.: Ça c’est l’ennemi due dehors; vote, theory of suicide, 25 See also Daumier, Honoré: Un héros de juilet, Mai 1831 Thierry, Édouard, 95–96 Thiers, Adolphe, 27 Thoré, Gustave, 78, 114, 120 Thoré, Theophile, 17, 62 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 76, 78, 82, 125–26 De la démocratie en Amérique, 125 Transnonain, rue de (Paris), 145 killings at, 28, 77 (see also Daumier, Honoré: Rue Transnonain) tricolor cockade, 21, 29 flag, 1–3, 14, 16, 25, 90, 98, 118 Triqueti, Henri de, La Loi protetrice and La Loi vengeresse, 47

index  ( 169 )

Tuileries, 4, 92 See also Daumier, Honoré, Le Gamin de Paris aux Tuileries

Vigny, Alfred de, Le More de Venise, 48–49 vote, theory of, ix Vraie République, La, 120

uprising of 1834, 26–28, 73

women, in the revolution, 6, 15 See also Delacroix, Eugène: La Liberté guidant le people: critical response to wood engravings, 19–20 workers. See “people, the”

Vernet, Horace, 33–34 L’Arrivée du duc d’Orleans au Palais Royal, 29–34, 32 Versailles, palace of, 33 Vignerte, Jean-­Jacques, 22, 149n6

( 170 )  index

Ziegler, Jules-­Claude, La République, 115