In the Court of the Pear King: French Culture and the Rise of Realism 9781501729393

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. It’s a Pear!
2. Realist Reality and Realist Duality
3. George Sand the Phallocrat and Don Juan the Pussycat
4. Liberty the Goddess, Robert the Devil, Louis-Philippe the King
5. Julien, Lucien, and Realist History
Conclusion: Realism Is Representational
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

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r!Fea;Jt9r~ FRENCH CULTURE AND THE RISE OF REALISM

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

Publication of this book was made possible, in part, with the generous support of the Office of the Vice President of Research at Stony Brook University; the Department of Comparative Uterary and Cultural Studies; and the College of Arts and Sciences, Stony Brook University.

Copyright © 2005 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2005 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Petrey, Sandy. In the court of the Pear King.: French culture and the rise of realism I Sandy Petrey. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8014-4341-5 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Louis Philippe, King of the French, 1773- 185o-Influence. Louis Philip, 183o-1848.

2.

France-History-

3. Symbolism in politics-France-19th century.

Intellectual life-19th century.

5· Realism in literature.

+·

France-

I. Title.

DC268.P48 2005

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, lowVOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing

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It's a Pear!

Realist Reality and Realist Duality

37

8.

George Sand the Phallocrat and Don Juan the Pussycat

70

4:

Liberty the Goddess, Robert the Devil, and Louis-Philippe the King

95 /""'

D. Julien, Lucien, and Realist History

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YfJ~~v: Realism Is Representational 144

FoR ALMOST ALL Americans living in the twenty-first century, the concept of a Pear King is something from fantasy, like a Frog Prince or a Wolf Bride. For almost all French citizens living in the nineteenth century, though, the Pear King was unmistakably real, not a fairy-tale character but one of France's reigning monarchs. Louis-Philippe, who ruled France from 1830 to 1848, was early in his regime caricatured as a pear. The caricature's popularity was so great that the king's identity with a pear became one of the few things on which his partisans and opponents agreed. Whether they loved him or hated him, Louis-Philippe's subjects saw his features wherever pears were drawn, thought of his policies whenever pears were mentioned. For us, pears and kings have no more in common than cabbages and kings had for the walrus and the carpenter in Lewis Carroll's poem. But in the 183os the pear and the king were so closely connected that they seemed to have everything in common. One stood for the other; each immediately and insistently evoked the other; it was impossible to mention one without simultaneously introducing the other. The king was a pear, every pear a king. France's national assimilation of pears to the king provides a remarkable demonstration that history is capable of bringing together entities apparently kept apart by every feature making them what they are. In the early twenty-first century, pears and kings are as far apart as pears and bunions or kings and Roquefort cheese. Under the July Monarchy, pears and kings were as tightly bound as bunions and corns or Roquefort and Stiiton. The association of France's king with its pears is consequently a historically bounded phenomenon. Firm and undoubted at one time, it is whimsical and extravagant at others. The identity was produced and preserved by a precise social configuration. The changing relationship between pears and kings means that the identity of each stands not as something given but as something produced, not as something derived from nature but as something established by society. Just this vision ofidentity's social vicissitudes characterizes the literary genre-realist fiction-that came into its own while the pear was beix

Preface coming the king. The topic specified in this book's subtitle, the rise of realism, is closely linked to the connection between the pear and the king. The early years of the July Monarchy were both the time when a head of state came to be universally recognized in a piece of fruit and the time when the realist novel was introduced into world literature. The pages that follow explore that simultaneity and the reasons for it. Realism emerged at the beginning of the July Monarchy as something at once radically new and completely mature. Many of the genre's most significant and influential works were produced during its first years. By common consent, for instance, Le rouge et lenoir is Stendhal's greatest contribution to realist fiction. That novel is also his earliest contribution torealist fiction. His first stroke was his masterstroke. With Balzac, the situation is less dramatic but also arresting. Balzac invented and perfected at the same time, changing the form of the novel while also showing the extraordinary heights the new form could attain. What, !have long wondered, allowed realism to dispense with the apprenticeship other literary schools needed before becoming themselves? How could realism's pathbreaking works have become its most imitated and admired monuments? The emergence of realism was dramatically sudden, revolutionary rather than evolutionary. In the late 182os, realism did not exist. By the mid183os, it was dominant. Remarkably, it has been dominant ever since. Realism's exceptionalism did not end with its instant maturity. Its supremacy among schools of fiction has continued into the twenty-first century, in national literatures throughout the world as well as in France and the rest of Europe. Challenges to realism have been serious, numerous, and important. But their failure to dislodge the genre they attack is apparent in the fact that they are still being made now, almost two hundred years later. Romanticism and classicism have passed into the history books. Manifestos no longer take them as targets. Innovators no longer define their novelty in relation to romantic agony or classical serenity. Realism, in contrast, remains a living form. Its stature is such that even those who most want to end its ascendancy have to say so explicitly and explain why painstakingly. When the moment of an aesthetic school has passed, its demise is marked by silence. That the realist moment has not passed is as apparent in the number of diatribes against it as in the number of continuations of it. Something momentous happened when French authors developed the X

Preface fictional forms we now designate as realist, and the historical circumstances surrounding the genre's birth are profoundly connected to the factors responsible for its unique status. Realism became itself around 1830, which is also the year France as a whole went through one of the regime changes for which it was celebrated in the decades following the Bastille's fall. In July 1830, a revolution in Paris ended a monarchy, as revolutions in Paris were in the habit of doing. What revolutions in Paris definitely were not in the habit of doing, however, also took place in 1830. The July Revolution produced the July Monarchy. The form of government that had been the inveterate foe of French revolutions became a French revolution's consequence and creation. Always before, furious crowds surging through the streets of France's capital had signaled that monarchy was on the way out. In 1830, those crowds also signaled that monarchy was on the way in. One of the results was national bewilderment at what national action had done, precisely the sort of bewilderment experienced by the young men from the provinces who, in the plot structure canonically defined as typical of realist fiction, encounter the capital city's sophisticated elegance and find their mental and emotional worlds topsy-turvy as a result. Realist protagonists must continually overhaul their ideas of what and who they are in response to an ongoing series of demonstrations that those ideas matter not at all to the society around them. The experiences that result are directly comparable to the cognitive turmoil produced when France changed its definition of what a revolution was, of who could be a king, after a revolution created a king in July 1830. One component of France's response to its forced encounter with a previously inconceivable relationship between revolutions and kings was a total reversal of its ideas about the relationship between pears and kings. While that reversal was taking place, French fiction was developing the techniques required to introduce previously unimaginable configurations of the relationship between self and society. In this book I address the ways the changes in one set of relationships can illuminate those in the other and discuss what the changing (dis) connection between the pear and the king says about the forms of novelistic creation that were introduced while the changes were taking place. My contention is that the circumstances under which realism developed are closely connected to the reasons that realist insights into the nature of reality became central to fiction's claims to say anything whatever about reality. xi

I have been working out the ideas in this book for a long time, in several essays that benefited from the comments of editors and consultant readers. Those essays appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, and French Review and in two anthologies: Reading Critics Reading, edited by Roger Parker and Mary Ann Smart (Oxford University Press, 2001) and Textuality and Sexuality, edited by Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester University Press, 1993). Maurice Biriotti, Cristina Mathews, Nancy K. Miller, Joan Stewart, and Margaret Waller read the entire manuscript at various stages and gave me consistently useful critiques. I am grateful to all of them for their intelligence and support.

xiii

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

It's a Pear!

The Caricature That Was a King The caricature of King Louis-Philippe as a pear is different from every other comic drawing of a man in power. Although that is a strong claim, several considerations justify it. First, the pear's association with the man it lampooned was far closer than the link other caricatures have had with their models. Many rulers have been represented in contemptuous graphic form. But, unlike other rulers, Louis-Philippe was so thoroughly identified with one particular graphic form, the pear, that every other comic figuration of him came to appear wrong. Ask anyone acquainted with French history to describe a caricature of Louis-Philippe, and you immediately hear about the pear. Ask the same question about another French king, no matter how famous, and you get either nothing or a range of responses. Caricatures have been around for a long time, as French history demonstrates with enchanting regularity. But the pear stands alone. It was welded to its object; man and fruit became inseparable. So inseparable were they that it sometimes seems the fruit replaced the man altogether. When the administrators of France's National Archives organized an exhibit on Louis-Philippe and his reign, they displayed appropriate respect for the man who had ruled their nation for eighteen years. Respect did not compromise their objectivity, however. When they discussed caricatures in their catalog, the exhibit's organizers straightforwardly announced that one particular caricature, the pear, had such huge popularity that it had done nothing less than merge with Louis-Philippe. Despite the regal splendor of the official portraits in their exhibit, the curators wrote, "It was in the shape of a pear that the image of Louis-Philippe was to establish itself in popular consciousness." 1 Although court painters

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

worked long and hard to give Louis-Philippe the dignity suited to his office, their efforts came to nothing. When France looked at him, it saw a pear. And vice versa: When France looked at a pear, it saw Louis-Philippe. The innumerable drawings of pears encountered throughout France under the July Monarchy were universally understood as ridicule of the king, and every reference to a pear was taken the same way. As one satirist pointed out, this identification was so powerful that cutting up a pear could look like the act of an anarchist slasher. If a drawing of the pear is harmful to the dignity of Louis-Philippe's government, all the more reason for the pear in three dimensions to be so. Must we mercilessly banish the pear itself from our shops and markets? Just think of the consequences! ... Every operation performed on this fruit by a knife or any other sharp instrument will be taken as proof of guilt, as facsimile of regicide. Then you have indictment, trial, capital punishment!2 Under Louis-Philippe, cutting into your pear became a subversive gesture that could well end with the government cutting into your neck. One man whose neck was cut into, Sebastien Peytel, learned that too late. Peytel was sentenced to death in 1839 for murdering his wife. Several prominent figures, Honore de Balzac among them, found the sentence severe and worked hard to have Louis-Philippe commute it. Their efforts were futile, in part because Peytel had earlier published a book called Physiology of the Pear that alternated direct criticism of Louis-Philippe with seemingly apolitical description of pears. By virtue of the pear's meaning at the time, the horticultural descriptions were as seditious as the political criticism. For three hundred pages, Peytel alternated between saying what he thought of the king and saying what he knew about pears. Both topics assaulted the only man with the power to hold back the guillotine's blade. The campaign to save Peytel was doomed.because he had written page after page about pears at a time when pages about pears made readers smirk about Louis-Philippe. At one point, Physiology of the Pear listed the names of 248 varieties of pear in a Rabelaisian compilation stretching on and on. Each of those names was a political broadside even though the pages on which they appeared never mentioned Louis-Philippe, his government, or his ministers. The 248 names of pears were 248 acts of subversion, and Peytel suffered the consequences. 2

It's a Pear! To read Physiology of "the Pear today is disconcerting, like looking at a Dadaist collage that brings together the most incongruous objects the artist can imagine, an umbrella beside a sewing machine on a dissecting table. But when Peytel was writing, the king and the pear were not incongruous at all, were wholly unlike an umbrella and a sewing machine. Early readers of Physiology of the Pear had no trouble finding transitions and connections invisible today. The sections of the book we read as agricultural taxonomy were partisan vitriol when Physiology of the Pear was published in 1832. Peytel had no need to clue in his readers when he moved from king to pears, from pears to king, because France's favorite caricature had taught an entire nation to see one whenever they looked at the other. Peytel's final sentence illustrates the structural principles of his book. After inviting his readers to make pear compote, he bids them farewell with these words: "We have now completed this learned dissertation on the Pear, perhaps already too long, and we crown it here with the blessed words THE ENn." 3 What made the· words blessed was France's awareness that closing a book about pears also urged citizens to close a chapter of their history that was "already too long." Physiology of the Pear appeared two years after Louis-Philippe assumed the throne. So powerful was the caricature's message that two years was more than enough time to produce an interpretive community that took the end of every commentary on pears as a clarion call to rise up and put an end to the king's reign as well. The members of the interpretive community for which Peytel wrote wanted Louis-Philippe's elimination. But consolidation of pear and king was by no means limited to the political opposition with which Peytel aligned himself. The king's supporters also saw him when they looked at pears, as Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen illustrates. The novel includes a lament by a government functionary whose association with Louis-Philippe has made his life miserable. If he happens to look directly at any young man, the functionary complains, he is immediately mocked by "a pear or some other seditious emblem. Even school kids show me pears." 4 The fascinating words here are "pear or some other seditious emblem." Pears were so clear a reference to the king they had lost their nonemblematic identity as edible objetts. The text of Lucien Leuwen sounds as if actual pears were tormenting Louis-Philippe's official. But in a note to himself, Stendhal specified that he was thinking about the pear most commonly seen, a crude drawing 3

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

on a walL Sketching that kind of pear in the margin of his manuscript, Stendhal noted that such figures were to be found "on all the walls of garrison towns in the east." 5 The pear's presence on "all the walls" of towns in the east brings up another crucial difference between it and other comic representations of men in power. Caricatures are ordinarily produced and circulated by one artist or (in rare cases) by a few. The pear was produced and reproduced by thousands, tens of thousands of French citizens. It not only appeared in every satirical journal read by the French, it was drawn on every vertical space they could reach. The geographical restriction to "towns of the east" in Stendhal's note to himself comes nowhere near describing the pear's ubiquity. This caricature covered walls in the south, north, and west as well. It was "chalked upon all the walls of the city" 6 of Paris and upon all the walls of the cities that took their cue from Paris, which of course means all the cities of France. The phrase "all the walls," common to descriptions of the pear's appearances in the provinces and in the capital, recurs throughout reports on France under the early July Monarchy. When Frances Trollope visited Paris in the mid- r83os, her strolls around the city led her through a forest of pears. To visit the Latin Quarter, she reported, was to find not students, teachers, and grisettes but "pears of every size and form, with scratches signifying eyes, nose, and mouth ... in all directions." 7 So thoroughly did this caricature blanket the nation that it became a reliable geographical signpost. Tourists from other countries knew they had reached the French frontier whenever pears came into view. "The symbolic pear has burst out of the capital, it's traveling, it's crisscrossing France. You find it at every stop on the main roads, at every intersection of any kind. The foreign visitor who reaches our borders knows, from spotting this allegorical fruit drawn on walls, that he has come to French soil." 8 The pear was everywhere. The pear could be everywhere only because people were drawing it everywhere. This caricature became a collective possession, the emblem of a multitude, something that belonged to the nation as a whole as well as to the man who first drew it, Charles Philipon. I will return later to the occasion for Philipon's creation of the pear. But what makes this caricature unique is not how it came to be but what happened afterward: Ordinary citizens tirelessly reproduced it whenever and wherever they could. Immediately after Philipon showed the way, drawing pears became 4

It's a Pear! a contagious mania throughout France, an ongoing derisive gesture that took the caricature away from its creator and made it public property, the proud possession of anyone with a piece of chalk and a wall to use it on. The pear is different not only because it solidly attached itself to Louis.: Philippe but also because it exuberantly detached itself from the man who first drew it. To appreciate its distinctiveness, compare the pear to other celebrated political caricatures such as Thomas Nast's much-reproduced portrait of Boss Tweed with a money bag where his face ought to be (figure 1 ) . Despite their powerful response to that money bag and Nast's other assaults on Tammany Hall, New Yorkers were never gripped by the reproductive frenzy the pear stimulated in France's citizens. No observer described the walls of New York covered with money bags, whereas scores of observers reported that the walls of France were covered with pears. Despite its powerful impact, Boss-Tweed-as-money-bag remained Thomas Nast's personal vision. Louis-Philippe-as-pear was the vision of France as a whole. Those who heard about Tweed and the money bag were almost certain to know that Thomas N ast had established the visual connection between them. The connection between Louis-Philippe and the pear was (and is) vivid for huge numbers of people who never heard of Charles Philipon. The pear stands apart, then, in the thoroughness of its identification

Figure 1. Thomas Nast, "The Brains of Tammany." Harper's Weekly. October 21, 1871. By permission of the British Library, shelfmarkA107 .

5

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

with its model and in the enthusiasm with which uncounted men, women, and children drew their own versions ofPhilipon's original. Both those differences, significant though they are, only accentuate the central problem posed by the pear: What does it say about the king that could possibly account for its unique popularity? Caricature is ordinarily a straightforward genre whose power is commensurate with its clarity. Political satire works best when its audience instantly grasps what it means, and here again the pear is different. Thomas Nast made Boss Tweed's face into a money bag to comment on Tammany Hall's corruption, just as he made members of the Tweed gang into vultures to criticize their rapacious greed. To put money where a man's head should be, to depict men as vultures gnawing on bones, is to make an instantly comprehensible statement, precisely tl1e sort of statement effective caricature thrives on. When the popular press wants to discuss how caricature works, Nast's drawings are the perfect illustration. As the New York Times put it, Nast's "acerbic depictions ... established Tweed in the popular mind as a bloated, corrupt politician." 9 The pear, however, says nothing similar. It combines unmatched popularity with a dauntingly hermetic message. Even when caricatures are less obvious than money bags, their effectiveness depends on accessibility. Garry Trudeau drew Bill Clinton as a waffle because Clinton "waffled" on so many issues that it seemed every new poll brought a different presidential policy. Although putting a w3Jfle where a man should be is less transparent than putting a money bag where a face should be, it is far from opaque. Trudeau's waffle and Nast's money bag both use one feature to represent their target's entire being, in the process making the target abject. By its etymology, a caricature is something bearing a load, a charge. Venality is the charge of the money bag, indecisiveness that of the waffle. But what is the pear's charge?What did it denounce with such scathing eloquence that hordes of French people rushed out to draw one for themselves? I'm by no means the first person to ask such a question, but I'm not at all satisfied with the answers others have proposed. Those answers fall into two general categories: first, Louis-Philippe actually looked like a pear, which made the caricature's charge a mockery of his appearance; or second, the French word for pear, poire, has the slang sense of "airhead" or "dodo," which made the charge a statement that Louis-Philippe was dumb as a post. Different versions of these explanations permeate most studies of Philipon's invention, to the point that the Encyclopaedia Bri6

It's a Pear!

tannica's article on caricature defines the pear as "an elaborate verbal and visual pun" and lets it go at that. Put the two explanations together-combine the verbal and the visual pun-and the pear represents LouisPhilippe as a bathetic loser with mental deficiencies written into his physical form. He becomes a god-given object of caricature, one who permits cruel attacks on his mind to pass for a neutral description of his body. It might look as if we are calling the king a nincompoop, France's hordes of pear-drawers were supposedly saying, but in fact we are showing him as he is-just look at him, you'll see what we mean. The longer I looked at him, however, the harder I found it to see a pear. By the standards of upper-class male corpulence in nineteenth-century France, Louis-Philippe was not fat at all. Even after making allowances for the flattery of official representations of royalty, the man simply does not have the appearance required to make millions of French people see him as a pear instead of a person (figure 2). That hordes of French people drew him as a pear is certain, but I am convinced their reason for doing so was not simply that they felt he looked like one. The physical resemblance explanation has fatal flaws, and the slang argument is even less plausible. According to French historical dictionaries such as the Grand Robert and the Tresor de la langue fran~aise, poire acquired its slang meaning decades after the pear came to designate Louis-Philippe. If · there is a connection, it runs not from popular speech to caricature but from caricature to popular speech. Moreover, even if we assume that the pejorative sense of poire entered spoken French long before the written occurrences on which historical dictionaries rely, slang is still inadequate to explain the pear's popularity. Citizens have always delighted in calling their leaders stupid, and they have invented a great many ways to do so. This very frequency makes it impossible to see why one particular way became a national obsession when so many others strutted their hour upon the stage and then were heard no more. Drawing a king as a dodo or a pumpkin would put him down as surely as calling him a poire. That is why dodoes and pumpkins, aardvarks and avocados, cobras and Venus'sflytraps, hyenas and briar patches, and many other members of the animal and vegetable kingdom have been used to ridicule authorities. But those other insults are forgotten while the pear lives on, as prominent in France's historical records as in its joke books. On the 1970s television series All in the Family, Archie Bunker liked to call his wife Edith a dingbat, and for a while dingbat was in common usage 7

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

around the United States. The word has now fallen out of favor, however, and using it today would be only a little less strange than saying "twentythree skiddoo" or "gadzooks." If poire and ding bat are different ways of saying the same thing, why was the first putdown so much more durable than the second? And why was one insult so much more attached to a single

Figure 2 . Horace Vernet, Louis-Philippe. Copyright Collection Roger-Viollet.

8

It's a Pear! person? Dingbat means stupid rather than "like Edith Bunker." But the pear designated Louis-Philippe throughout his reign and continues to designate him more than a century and a half after he died. French people of every political persuasion came to see their king in the shape of a pear and to see a pear as the shape of their king. Although the Grand Robert agrees that the pear's usage under Louis-Philippe cannot explain the slang sense of poire, the association between the two is so strong that the dictionary feels . obliged to dismiss it explicitly. Will the dictionaries of the twenty-second century evoke Edith Bunker in their entries on dingbat? I don't think so. The pear's tenacious attachment to Louis-Philippe becomes all the more remarkable when we consider his government's monumental efforts to combat it. With the same energy and devotion other governments use to validate preferred symbols such as flags, the July Monarchy worked tirelessly to eliminate this detested caricature. A state's ideological machinery constantly strives to make its signs for itself into icons of great worth. The pear was an icon of great goofiness. Instead of a government creation, it was an antigovernment hoot, and the authorities did everything they could to obliterate it. The pear's indomitable refusal to go away is by no means the least impressive feature of its remarkable career. France's repressive forces were massiv~ly, mercilessly arrayed against it, and the pear withstood them all. To the consternation of official France, unoffical France kept drawing pears no matter how severe the penalties imposed on people caught with their chalk out. Such devotion means that the pear simply has to be more than another way of calling Louis-Philippe a dingbat fatty. The number of heads of state who have looked funny and acted stupid is huge (and growing every day). The number of caricatures of heads of state that have had the success and resilience of the pear is incomparably smaller. The pear established LouisPhilippe's pyriform appearance ·so firmly that it stimulated a new form of popular activity, that of covering "all the walls" of Paris and the provinces with pears. Where other caricatures have a founder I proprietor and a journalistic home, the pear belonged to everyone and was at home everywhere. Moreover, other caricatures succeed in proportion to the clarity of their message. The pear says something hard to understand, something that has confounded a great many efforts to explain it. Philipon's caricature was able to speak for an entire nation without being at all up-front about what it was saying. Its ambiguity began with its birth, when Charles Philipon orchestrated 9

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

its introduction to the public by insisting the pear neither had nor ever could have the slightest connection to Louis-Philippe. Philipon forged the indissoluble link between his drawing and his sovereign by insisting that no link of any ·kind brought the two together. The pear's distinctiveness is not simply that its association with its object is solid, widespread, and durable. In addition, the association began with the contention that the dissociation was absolute. The pear came to designate Louis-Phillippe through a theatrical demonstration that it did not resemble him physically, evoke him morally; or describe him mentally. The demonstration was made on November 14; 1831, when Philipon was on trial in the Paris Cour d' Assises for outrages against the person of the king. The alleged outrages occurred in drawings for La Caricature, the satirical journal Philipon edited. This was the eleventh time Philipon had defended himself against similar charges, and this time his offense was a drawing La Caricature had published some months before the trial (figure 3). It showed Louis-Philippe dressed as a mason, busily plastering over the slogans that had inspired the July Revolution of 1830, which put the new king on the throne. In other words, the message of this particular caricature was as obvious as the money bag Nast set on Boss Tweed's shoulders. As depicted in La Caricature, Louis-Philippe was Judas, violating the principles he had sworn to uphold, betraying the people who had given him a crown, reneging on the promises he had made a short while before. · Philipon's defense for publishing the indicted caricature was an ingenious elaboration of points he had made in earlier trials. He said that, while it might be true that the mason in his drawing looked like Louis-Philippe, there was no way juridically to determine that it was Louis-Philippe. His argument was this: Even if royal majesty is indeed incarnate in the person of the king, lese-majeste occurs only when it can be shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the person being slighted is in fact the king. Philipon contended that his drawing did not show Louis-Philippe plastering over the slogans responsible for his reign. All it did was show somebody, doing so, and the path from "somebody" to "Louis-Philippe" had to be based on evidence more solid than physical resemblance. Only conventional signs of monarchy reliably identify a monarch. Mere appearances are not a sign of any kind. Philipon to the court: A resemblance, even if perfect, is never an attack; you must not recognize it as such, and you must above all refrain from sanctioning it by a verdict. The injury is precise and proven solely by the name of the king, 10

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Figure 3· Caricature of Louis-Philippe as a m ason, La Caricature, June 30, 1831. By permission of the British Library, shelfmark F59· This was the offending caricature for which Philipon was being prosecuted when he first drew Louis-Philippe as a pear.

11

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

by titles or insignia coupled with his image, which is then, whether there's a resemblance or not, guilty and deserving of punishment. And is the king designated in our drawings by his name, his titles, or his insignia? Not at all! You must therefore believe me when I say it is power I'm representing by a sign, by a resemblance that can as well belong to a mason as to a king; but it's not the king. 10 In other words, you can believe your eyes only when what they see includes explicit verbal identification. No matter how the figure in a drawing looks, "it's not the king" unless something in the drawing says it is. Philipon used visual aids to drive his point home. He showed the court four sketches that moved progressively from a straight portrait of LouisPhilippe to a (nearly) straight portrait of a pear (figure 4-). His argument was that physical resemblance is so unsound, so misleading a guide to identity that dependence on it is a surefire way to make the law an ass. Philipon's first sketch looked like Louis-Philippe, the second like the first, the third like the second, and the last like the third. Yet the last is not the king, as any fool could plainly see. In Philipon's triumphant words, "It's a pear! " 11 Courts failing to understand that royal identity is not physical but conventional are doomed to prosecute even those innocents who draw a picture of a harmless fruit. Since everyone knows that a pear and a king are worlds apart, everyone ought to recognize that the mason in La Caricature was worlds removed from Louis-Philippe. Philipon went further. He argued that a court condemning an artist because of appearances would have to prosecute much more than pears. Incalculable numbers of objects-a brioche, a pig bladder, "a mass of things more than bizarre" 12 -were in Philipon's presentation flagrantly unlike Louis-Philippe but still susceptible to becoming criminal offenses if courts were silly enough to rule on the basis of appearance. The pear was featured not because it looked like Louis.:. Philippe but because it stood for all the things in the world that did not. The exclamation point is definitive. It's not the king, "it's a pear!" Philipon's satirical verve did not abandon him even in court, and there is certainly a measure of irony in "it's a pear!" He would not have minded at all if the members of his audience did in fact see the king in a pear, just as he would not have minded if they saw the king as a pig bladder or a brioche. But the pear was wholly unlike the mason, who had been drawn to look as much like Louis-Philippe as possible. The pear was drawn to demonstrate that anything whatsoever could look like Louis-Philippe. It 12

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Figure 4. The drawings presented in Philipon's defense during the pear triaL From La Caricature, November 24, 1831. Private collection.

13

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

stood in for every conceivable object, for a mass of things more than bizarre. Philipon's message to his audience was that anything could be taken for anyone. It was not that the king and the pear were alike. It was that no two things are so unlike as to be unassimilable. What Philipon said and what his audience heard, however, were mindbogglingly different. Philipon's lesson was taken as a convincing demonstration that the king looked so much like a pear he could not be anything else. The argument that two objects were incommensurate led directly and immediately to a national conviction that they were one and the same. Just after his trial, Philipon hung his courtoom drawings in his office window, where they made an enormous impression. Their success was even greater when, ten days after the trial and a week after reporting on the arguments they illustrated, La Caricature published Philipon's sketches themselves. National identification of the first and last of the pear drawings was instantaneous, complete, and downright delirious. To draw a pear, to hold a pear, to say "pear" became a guaranteed laugh-getter. For the rest of the July Monarchy, the person of Louis-Philippe and the shape of the pear, august majesty and pyriform succulence, were one and indivisible. The speed of the pear's spread was dizzying. A month after the sketches first appeared in print, Heinrich Heine featured them in the opening installment of his brilliant reports on France after the July Revolution. Three months later, Heine described the pear as France's "standing national joke," 13 an assessment confirmed by many other observers. Sebastien Feytel's Physiology of the Pear is one of several works to appear in 1832 that would make no sense at all unless its readers were in on the joke, unless the joke were indeed national. A year after he drew his most famous sketch, Philipon wrote an article for La Caricature entitled "Invasion of the Pear and Measures Tending to Repress It." The article claimed that pears, already covering the walls of Notre Dame, would soon appear on the pyramids of Egypt. Moreover, Philipon pointed out, the number of pears could only mean that many people were drawing them, which gave this joke deadly serious political weight. We admit it, it's not without a legitimate sensation of fatherly pride that we watch this grotesque figure invade the walls of the capital, and not only of the capital. ... It's by the number of pears in such and such a place that ministers now assess the extent of local hostility to the government. This circumstance has become one of the indispensable notations in every cabinet report on France's state of mind. 14 14

It's a Pear! With public opinion measured by counting pears, local officials could best ingratiate themselves by making sure the count in their section of France remained low. According to Philipon, the mayor ofAuxerre did just that. He ordered that all walls in the city be repainted to cover up their pears, then added a coda to the standard municipal admonition against dumping any kind of garbage. The new version prohibited drawing "any kind ofpear" 15 as well. The mayor of Auxerre's zeal, further proof that the pear's identification with Louis-Philippe was as close for the government's servants as for its opponents, also illustrates the extent of France's pear-drawing drive under the July Monarchy. Philipon's "fatherly pride" was justified. His creation entered the public domain with unparalleled speed. And with extraordinary precision in the message. The government's opponents and supporters, members of the elite and.plebeians, young men from the provinces and old ladies from the capital, pear-drawers and pear-watchers, all heard the pear shouting, "I am Louis-Philippe!"To take a famous example, in June 1832 La Caricature showed an immense pear standing in the Place de la Concorde, the square where Louis XVI had been guillotined forty years before (figure s). Playing on the word poire, Philipon called the new statue a monument expiapoire, invoking various mon-

Figure 5· The Monument Expiapoire, from La Caricature, June 7, 1832. By permission of the British Library, shelfmark F59.

15

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

uments expiatoires built under the Restoration to "expiate" revolutionary France's sin in chopping off the head of its divinely selected ruler. One of those monuments, the chapelle expiatoire, is still standing (and still expiating) where it was inaugurated in r825, when it became one of many means devised to show the world that France had left revolution behind and chosen monarchy instead. Philipon's drawing thus managed to make fun of the king, of the Restoration's faith-based initiatives, and of the supposed difference between the Restoration and the new regime set up by the three-day revolution of July 27, 28, and 29, r83o. To drive home the last point, La Caricature specified that the pear monument was to have "on its pedestal this exercise in addition engraved in figure.s of blood: 27 28 Result

19.

oo" 16

I find the monument expiapoire hilarious. The government found it an incitement to regicide. Six months after they were first put side by side, LouisPhilippe and the pear had so thoroughly merged that to draw a pear where a king had been guillotined was the legal equivalent of urging that the present king lose his head there. The connection was therefore rock-solid, but was it physical? Not for me, and not for observers such as Charles Baudelaire, whose analysis of Philipon's courtroom sketches is eloquent on the futility of trying to explain the pear's success by the king's appearance. "Analogous experiments have been conducted on the heads of Jesus and Apollo, and I believe one of the two has successfully been made to look like a toad. This proved absolutely nothing. The symbol had been found by an accommodating analogy. The symbol was from then on sufficient." 17 Like Jesus and a toad, Louis-Philippe and a pear belong together not because of physical features but because of mental operations. You can if you want make LouisPhilippe pearlike, just as you can make Apollo toadlike. But such games prove nothing. Symbols depend not on what people see but on how they think. The July Monarchy's campaign against the pear is rich in proofs that the caricature's force had nothing to do with physical appearance. In 1835, the harshly repressive September Laws made drawing pears of any kind 16

It's a Pear! felonious sedition. Censors responded by swooping down on every object that could in poor light and from a weird angle remind somebody shortsighted of something that looked a little like a pear. The 1835 prosecutions demonstrated the truth of Philipon's 1831 prediction. The government that saw an offense in a pear was doomed to find one in things more than bizarre. The new censorship laws were passed on September 9, 1835. On September 24, Le Charivari, also a Philipon journal, reported on the results in an article with a scrumptious title, "Censors Suppress Dumb Animals; It's Practically Suicide." Le Charivari had presented the censors with a drawing that contained a young lady, a dog, a cat, a monkey, several birds, and a rabbit. The rabbit was drawn from the rear, and the censors perceived a resemblance "between a rabbit thus seen and a pear on which someone has stuck ears." The Charivari staff redrew the picture and tried again. We presented the drawing to the censors a second time on September 20, after removing the subversive rabbit. Now what did they tell us on September 20? That the censorship council had to meet to consider the matter. The council met and, after due deliberation, refused the drawing yet again. The grounds were that, while the rabbit no longer existed, there was on the table a carafe that looked like the rabbit that looked like a pear that looked like etc. That's when we had to give up. on our picture. Even if we had gone ahead and erased the carafe, the censors (excuse the term) would have been sure to discover a candy jar that looked like the carafe; then a clock that looked like the candy jar; then a vase that looked like the clock; and so on and so forth. 18 The censors' manic quest for pyromorphs is absurd. But the point that matters is that it is inherently no less silly to see a king in a pear (as all of France did) than to see a pear in a rabbit, a rabbit in a carafe, a carafe in a clock, and so on and so forth. A pear looks like Louis-Philippe no more and no less than a rabbit looks like a pear with ears, or than Jesus looks like a· toad. The link does not come from the world, it is imposed on the world. Frances Trollope demonstrated why during her visit to the Latin Quarter in 1835. Here is the context she gives for a passage I quoted earlier: "Pears of every size and form, with scratches signifying eyes, nose, and mouth, were to be seen in all directions; which, being interpreted, denotes the contempt of the juvenile students for the reigning monarch." 19 To an uninformed observer, pears of every size and form are just a weird 17

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

bunch of pears. It is only on "being interpreted" that they become the king. For those like the censors, whose sensitivity to political messages is hypertrophied, a pear is vile subversion, a rear view of a rabbit iniquitous calumny. To those (like the Englishwoman Frances Trollope) not in touch with France, pears are pears. For both, and for all those in between, a symbol's message is independent of its appearance. As Baudelaire insisted, what a caricature means and how it looks are two different things. As a result, how the pear looks is irrelevant to what it did. Consider these three points. First, before November 14, r83r, the day Philipon dashed off his courtroom sketches, no one ever looked at Lollis-Philippe and thought, "Say, this guy looks just like a pear!" The sequence was not appearanceassociation but association-appearance. Second, even after November 14, r83r, the pear-king nexus was semiotic rather than perceptual. Only those who knew France's political scene saw Louis-Philippe in the pear and the pear in Louis-Philippe. And third, Philipon and his fellow caricaturists were so unconcerned with physical features that they routinely shifted the part resembling a pear from the king's face to his torso and back again. Such a displacement would be impossible if physical reality mattered. Moreover, caricaturists represented many politicians other than LouisPhilippe as pears, again an absurdity if features were at issue. Despite the massive number of people who thought otherwise, Philipon's r83r exclamation wa:s spot-on-it's not the king, it's a pear! But if this caricature did not actually look like Louis-Philippe, why did so many people think it did? Baudelaire was exceptional. For most commentators, the pear's association with the king was not that of Apollo to a toad but that of a duplicate to the original. Even before the courtroom sketches were published, while they were still available only in Philipon's window, an article in another newspaper described them as showing that "nature herself ... set in a certain pear the exact type of face seen on Louis-Philippe." 20 Immediately after the sketches appeared in print, those who saw them agreed that, as RodolpheApponyi put it in his journal, "the resemblance with the king is perfect." 21 It is true no one thought LouisPhilippe looked like a pear before November 14, 1831. It is also true that afterwards almost everyone in France thought so, and some even argued that nature herself had made the resemblance perfect. It was in the shape of a pear that the image of Louis-Philippe would establish itself in popular consciousness, which considered the shape of a pear and the shape of the king patently congruent. 18

It's a Pear! This congruence, I believe, points to the answer to the problem with which this chapter began: What makes the pear different from other caricatures of men in power? But it provides the answer not because nature herself made Louis-Philippe look like a pear but because Charles Philipon showed his countrymen that they could speak and draw in such a way as to make him look however they chose. The charge of this caricature is not that Philipon saw something already there, something he needed only point out for everyone else to see it as well. On the contrary; ithe charge is that he brought into being something that was not there before but that immediately became as certain as a law of nature. In the same way that drawing Jesus as a toad bears religious weight regardless of whether any actual resemblance exists, representing Louis-Philippe as a pear conveyed a political message independent of his actual appearance. In the rhetorical device called preteritio, claiming not to be doing something is a way to do it, and quite effectively ("I won't even mention your years in prison for child molestation," for instance). It may well be that Philipon was using preteritio in insisting the king was not a pear. But his caricature stands alone because of the glee the rest of France felt in declaring that. the negation of any form, even that of preteritio, was stupid when a pear was exactly what the king looked like. The caricature gripped a nation because it started as one thing and immediately became its opposite. What counted was the king's metamorphosis, the highly improbable but irrefutably complete conversion of "it's not the king because it's a pear!" into "It's a pear, so it must be the king!" On November 14, 1831, Philipon presented his sketches to the Cour d'Assises as the epitome of difference. The next week, tout Paris was strolling by his office window to admire the genius with which his sketches illustrated the Platonic ideal of sameness. The caricature became a national obsession because pear and king stood as otherness and sameness together, as simultaneously opposition and identity. It is useless to worry whether Philipon was correct to say there was no resemblance or France correct to say the resemblance was perfect or Baudelaire correct to say whatever resemblance there was did not matter. The pear worked its magic not through a greater or lesser degree ofresemblance but through the conversion of something int~oduced as false into radiantly self-evident truth. This conversion spoke directly to the France of the early July Monar19

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

chy, a nation living its own transformation of falseness into truth, otherness into sameness, opposition into identity. Louis-Philippe's reign began in popular rebellion but survived by defining every impulse toward popular rebellion as a horrid crime. Reactions against this betrayal took a large number of forms, from out-and-out condemnation to subtle irony and poignant regret. The form that worked the best, the political statement that got themessage across most tellingly, was the pear. It became the ultimate political caricature by refusing overt political content. Instead of condemning the illogic in the claim that a product of revolution was above revolution, the pear incarnated illogic by effecting the same metamorphosis of difference into identity, repudiation into replication. The fruit that dislodged a king was the rollicking dismissal of the king who dislodged a revolution. The French drew pears wherever they could to blast the skulduggery that had transformed their rebellion against monarchy into monarchy's founding act. The movement from revolutionary destruction to counterrevolutionary preservation was the starting point for the pear's movement from difference to sameness.

The King Who Was Not Just a Caricature Although their shocking incongruity has eroded over time, "July Revolution" and "July Monarchy" were an oxymoronic pair in 1830, the year they both entered France's political lexicon. By definition, a month that gave its name to.a French revolution could not possibly give birth to a French monarchy. French revolutions do not set kings on thrones but blast them off. The proclamation of the French Republic in 1792 had left monarchy and revolution mutually exclusive, mutually antagonistic categories. Where one was, the other was not. For the first millennium and a half of its existence, France had had a monarchy and therefore did not have revolution. Then came a quarter-century in which it had revolution and therefore did not have monarchy. The alternation continued with the restoration of the old regime after Napoleon's downfall. The monarchy was back, it was revolution's turn to disappear. During its fifteen years, the Bourbon Restoration worked just as hard to make France believe revolution was gone forever as the sansculottes had worked to proclaim monarchy gone forever. While France's royalists and revolutionaries agreed on very little during the turbulent decades after 1789, on one point·

20

It's a Pear! they were in total agreement. Revolution could succeed only by obliterating royalty, royalty could survive only by annihilating revolution. Yet in 1830 revolution created royalty. Louis-Philippe's kingship began with an act that precluded it absolutely. As all of France and much of the rest of the world knew, a Parisian multitude in violent upheaval on a July day was monarchy's most implacable foe. In July 1830, that multitude did exactly what was expected of it. It overthrew the king and forced him out of the country God had supposedly given him to rule. But then something previously inconceivable happened. The mob that had just demonstrated its power to sweep thrones away decided to show it could also set them up. It crowned a new king and performed the thaumaturgic act of transforming "July Revolution" into "July Monarchy." Depending on the observer's ideological perspective, producing monarchy from revolution was equivalent either to converting base metal into gold or gold into base metal. Regardless of the observer's ideological perspective, the conversion was something that had never been seen and had hardly ever been imagined. Consider the precedent under which the revolution of July 1830 was operating, the world-historical transformation of France that began in July 1789. The earlier revolution had become an object of Continental fascination by virtue of the thoroughness with which it attacked royalty, first removing the king's powers in fact and law, then removing the king's head to make sure the point got across. Those who overthrew France's king believed the position he held made him "in the moral order what a monster is in the physical order," 22 and revolution's purpose was to purge the earth of such monsters. As Jules Michelet put it, France's abolition of the monarchy was distinctive because it "struck not only the dethroned king but the potential king as well." 23 The enemy was not a man but an office, not Louis XVI but the idea that anyone could claim the divine right to rule over his fellows, now or in the future. Monsters were monsters whenever and however encountered, and the first French Revolution perceived everyone who sat on a throne as monstrous. Yet less than forty years later, a different French revolution instituted as · well as destroyed a kingship, set a man on the throne after dragging another man off, declared one king a monster to be destroyed prior to declaring that enthroning another king was a really neat idea. The change was all the more shocking because of the widespread conviction that the events of 1830 were a continuation of the first French Revolution, less a 21

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

new version of history than an object lesson in why this history was not past. Like many of his contemporaries, Alexis de Tocqueville saw France's two July revolutions as different episodes of a single struggle. "Our history, from 1789 to 1830, seen from a distance and as a whole, must appear as the spectacle of a fierce struggle between the old regime ... and the new France spearheaded by the middle class. Eighteen thirty closed this first period of our revolutions, or rather of our revolution, for there is only one, a revolution always the same." 24 It was not just that the 1830 revolution occurred in the same month as the storming of the Bastille. It was that 1830 and 1789 were different moments of the same struggle. Yet this single entity, which had earlier been monarchy's implacable enemy, became in 1830 monarchy's founding precondition. In 1792, the Revolution went to the Tuileries and made the king an impotent prisoner. In r83o, it went to the Hotel deVille and made the due d'Orleans a reigning monarch. In the opinion ofTocqueville and others, the French Revolution was "always the same." Even if that assessment is correct, the same revolution clearly had different effects at different times. In its first stage, it led the French people (Tocqueville again) "to want to place an abyss between what they had been before and what they wanted to be from then on. To this end, they took great precautions to assure that nothing from the past would come into their new condition." 25 In its second stage, revolution led those same French people to bring into their new condition the past's most recognizable identifying mark, the French monarchy. Kingship's nemesis, the relentless crusader against the crown, the deadliest threat to the throne, became the nurturing environment in which throne, crown, and kingship found life. As would be expected, it required politicians with extraordinary manipulative talents to move France from revolution to monarchy in 1830. Fully aware that national thought and practice declared that no king could emerge from a French revolution, those politicians mounted their campaign for a king by proclaiming over and over that they did not want one. Louis-Philippe's identification with the pear began with Charles Philipon's presentation of an unbridgeable distance between them. Louis-·. Philippe's coronation began with multiple statements by his partisans with a comparable message: No one could possibly be less likely to become a king. His supporters defined Louis-Philippe as not the bearer of royal privilege but 'the figure of popular sovereignty, the living image of the power that had just been displayed in the streets. 22

It's a Pear! True, he was the head of the younger branch of France's royal family, the Bourbons. But that bloodline would count only in other nations, which wanted to believe that the French monarchy continued undisturbed. In France itself, the new leader would incarnate the spirit of revolution. He would rule not because he had Bourbon blood but because his people had revolutionary zeal. That was the dominant theme of the campaign that transformed the due d'Orlt~ans into King Louis-Philippe, a brilliantly orchestrated argument that this man deserved the crown because he did not want it. Since it was to overthrow monarchy that the people of Paris fought and bled, killed and died on July 27, 28, and 29, 1830, the best way to induce them to accept a monarch was to make them believe they were getting something else. Consequently, before dawn on July 30, 1830, architects of a new dynasty went to work to show that the dynasty they meant was not royal but revolutionary. They distributed thousands of handbills announcing that the due d'Orleans is a prince devoted to the cause of the Revolution. The due d'Orleans has never fought against us. The due d'Orleans was at Jemmapes. The due d'Orleans is a citizen king. The due d'Orleans bore the tricolor flag under fire .... He accepts the Charter as we have always desired and understood it. It is from the French people that he will hold his crown. 26 Instead of a king with the white flag of the Bourbons, France would have in the due d'Orleans a soldier of the Revolution with the tricolor flag of the French Republic. Charles X, the king whose army fired on French citizens, would be replaced by a patriot who was himself fired on at the great revolutionary battle of Jemmapes. Because the new ruler's crown would come from the people instead of from God, he would rule by popular support rather than divine right. Like that between a pear and a king, any resemblance between the due d'Orleans and a king was meaningless happenstance. This might be a prince, but he was a prince devoted to the cause of the Revolution, and the cause of the Revolution (with a capital R) was and always would be the extirpation of kings. The Jp.ly 30 handbill wholeheartedly endorsed the opposition between monarchy and revolution and just as wholeheartedly set the due d'Orleans on revolution's side. He had fought revolutionary battles, .had carried the revolution's flag, had dedicated himself to the revolutionary ideals

23

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

of liberty, equality, fraternity. In 1831, Philipon argued that his sketch could not be the king because "it's a pear!" He was foreshadowed by the partisans of the due d'Orleans, who insisted that their man could not possibly be a king. He was a sansculotte! Like Philipon, supporters of the due d'Orleans used visual aids to illustrate their point. On July 31, during a ride through Paris, the prospective monarch repeatedly ran into hostile crowds, heady from the victory over his predecessor and raucously shouting "No more Bourbons!" when they saw the duke. The situation changed dramatically when the man who would be king appeared on a balcony of the Hotel de Ville in the company of the marquis de Lafayette, the hero of two continents' revolutions against kings. [The due d'Orleans] seized a tricolor flag within his reach and, taking the arm of General Lafayette, moved briskly toward a window overlooking the Place de Greve, filled at that moment by an immense multitude whose most frequent cry was No more Bourbons! On the appearance of the due d'Orleans and Lafayette, both so to speak wrapped in the folds of the national colors, a shout rose from the bowels of the multitude. That shout, unanimous this time, was "Long live the due d'Orlt~ans! Long live Lafayette!"The revolution was averY This celebrated balcony scene opened the way to the monarchy by suggesting that nobody was interested in taking it. The tricolor flag enveloping Lafayette and the due d'Orleans in what would be known as their republican kiss decisively repudiated monarchy. It came from France's first successful uprising against the Bourbons and was a highly charged symbol for popular democracy. The Bourbon Restoration, the regime overthrown by the July Revolution, outlawed the tricolor flag legally and attacked it physically. Under the Restoration, the white flag alone was allowed to stand for France. The tricolor's reappearance in 1830 was therefore a powerful statement that the rebels' goal was not to reform the Restoration but to terminate it. The tricolor's appearance above Notre Dame on July 28, three days before the due d'Orleans was to appropriate it for his own purpose, was a galvanizing moment, immortalized in Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People and in the memories of a host of participants (figure 6). The revolt was at first "nothing but a riot. The tricolor flag was unfurled. Then the revolution began." 28 Those laconic sentences did not need conjunctions for the 24

It's a Pear! simple reason that the causal relation they articulate was obvious to all readers. The revolution began because the tricolor flag was unfurled, because the tricolor flag and the revolution against monarchy were a single historical thrust. The handbill first proposing the due d'Orh~ans as king specified not only that he accepted the tricolor but that he joined the French people in repudiating Bourbon white. The message was repeated on the balcony of the Hotel de Ville. When the due d'Orh~ans wrapped the tricolor around himself, he was saying that his opposition to monarchy was as fierce as that of the Parisians who had just mounted the barricades to destroy it. He was not only a sansculotte, he was a militant sansculotte. That is why he endorsed his partisans' use of the sansculotte title, citizen. The term citizen-king first appeared in the July 30 handbill, and like the July Revolution-July Monarchy pair, a century and a half of repetition has attenuated the jarring dissonance of its two terms. Citizen was the word

Figure 6. Eugene Delacroix, July 28,1830: Liberty Leading the People. Copyright Collection RogerViollet.

25

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

chosen by the first French Revolution to replace titles that designated social distinctions such as those between commoners and nobility or subject and sovereign. Everyone was a citizen so that speaking to anyone would not indicate a superior or inferior status. and the term king is puffery unless the king's superiority is a lived reality for everyone in his realm. It is not by accident that citizen came into standard usage while the revolutionary assembly was trying to assure that France would never have a king again. The French Republic uncrowned Louis XVI and declared its own existence on September 22, 1792. That was also the day the assembly heard the argument that citizen was the only vocative suited to the new world it was constructing. "Citizens! When the revolution is completely made in things, we must also make it in words. Citizen is the sole title that should appear in all the measures you enact." 29 That sentence and others like it from the first French Revolution established the explanatory context for the title attached to the due d'Orleans in the second. Since "citizen" is heard when kings are deposed, not when they are created, the only way for the word to combine with king was for one of the two terms to mean something other than what it had always meant. The term first redefined was king. What France crowned on August 9, 1830, was a citizen. The nation's representatives took pains to insure that the coronation ceremony made very clear they were making a CITIZENking, a man whose title dismantled monarchy as vigorously as it eliminated his flag. The new ruler was not to be King of France but King of the French, not the chosen of God but the chosen of the people. The word king remained, but the man bearing it was to have nothing in common with all the kings who had gone before. So different was he that his reign would not be a monarchy at all but what Lafayette was widely reported to have called it, the best of republics. The abyss between Louis-Philippe and the kings who had preceded him is obvious when we compare his coronation to that of Charles X, the man he replaced after the July Revolution. Details of Charles X's 1825 coronation coalesced into a ringing affirmation that he was king by divine right, in every way identical to the kings who had come before. He was crowned where God and precedent decreed French kings should be, in the cathedral at Reims where Clovis had converted to Christianity in the fifth century. The most striking indication of God's pleasure at this return to Reims after decades of revolutionary iconoclasm was the miraculous 26

It's a Pear! discovery of a few drops of the sacred oil always used to anoint French kings, oil everyone believed had been destroyed during the Terror. Charles X's coronation was a massive, finely choreographed attempt to show that "the Revolution was now a mere accident of French history, a rebellion whose memory would soon be erased." 30 The coronation that followed the July Revolution was the exact opposite. Now the purpose was to show that royalty was an accident of French history, an aberration whose memory would soon be erased. LouisPhilippe took office not in the traditional cathedral, where it might appear he was king by the grace of God, but in a legislative hall before representative bodies in congress assembled. Since he was to rule by the will of the people, the institution of his authority was an elaborate acting-out of his subservience to them. One staunch defender of popular sovereignty described the coronation like this: It was a beautiful spectacle, this enthronement of a king risen from the

hands of the people, coming into the sanctuary of the laws, to the accompaniment of the popular songs of 1792, wed to the patriotic inspirations of 1830; the due d'Orleans waited on a modest stool until the delegates of the nation had given him permission to take his seat on the throne. Who will ever forget it? The people were again present in all the dignity of their power, and never had the relationship of creature to Creator been more religiously observed; shouts of "Long live the due d'Orleans!" and not "Long live the king!" echoed across the room .... A standing king speaking to a seated people, this king finally authorized to seat himself on the throne where, for the first time, he was hailed with the title of monarch. 31 By any previously accepted definition, a French king is born not made. But by all the rites of the due d'Orleans's conversion into Louis-Philippe I, this king was being made. It was the people's decision, the people's will, the people's power that gave him the right to rule, that made the citizen a king. This was not monarchy. It was government of the people, by the people, for the people! Instead of multiple signs of divine approval, including a miracle, LouisPhilippe became king during a ceremony in which God was a bit player. The Creator-creature relationship "r~ligiously observed" in 1830 was that of king to people, not king to God. The Creator with a capital C was human, and its creature was a citizen. Not only was God dismissed, the past was also evacuated. Charles X's 27

IN THE COURT OF THE PEAR KING

r825 ceremony featured a maniacal effort to insist that French history had proceeded intact and unruffled from the fifth century to the nineteenth and would proceed intact and unruffled from the nineteenth to the fiftieth. The r83o ceremony was just as maniacal, but in the opposite direction. Now the goal fanatically pursued was one never seen before. Instead of observing every precedent that could be discovered, the men who installed Louis-Philippe wanted the unprecedented, the unexampled. What made Louis-Philippe King of the French had never made anyone king of anything. Setting, language, props, and protocol were invented for the occasion. Royal authority traditionally comes from the will of God and the wisdom of the ages. Louis-Philippe's authority came from a ceremony to which God was not invited and for which the wisdom of the ages was irrelevant. On August 9. r83o, the new monarch's reign began in a heavyhanded proclamation that he was not to be a reigning monarch. Yet he began to be one on August ro, r83o. The citizen turned into a king as fast as the king into a pear. Once Louis-Philippe assumed the throne, citizen became the null component of his title, and the July Monarchy started to squeeze the July Revolution into oblivion. Odilon Barrot dates the reinstitution of royal pomp and privilege from the instant LouisPhilippe received the crown: This king's "reign was, from its first day to the last, nothing but a committed struggle by the king against the most elementary conditions of the government he had been called to defend." 3 2 Like positive and negative electrical charges, monarchy and revolution were mutually destructive. The more monarchical he became, the more Louis-Philippe had to oppose the basic principle of the revolution that gave him life. This creature's relation to his Creator was that of the monster to Dr. Frankenstein. The months that followed the July Revolution left the message ofLouisPhilippe's coronation fuzzier and fuzzier while making his royal majesty loftier and)oftier. In late r83r, with the pear pojsed to become France's national obsession, Fran