The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France 9780271061900

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THE POLITICS OF THE PROVISIONAL

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THE POLITICS OF THE PROVISIONAL ART AND EPHEMERA IN REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

RICHARD TAWS

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The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taws, Richard, 1977– The politics of the provisional : art and ephemera in revolutionary France / Richard Taws. p. cm. Summary: “Examines how ephemeral images and objects made in 1790s France mediated the memory of the French Revolution and enabled new forms of political subjectivity”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 978-0-271-05418-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Art—Political aspects—France—History— 18th century. 2. Art and popular culture—France—History— 18th century. 3. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799. I. Title. N72.P6T39 2013 701'.03094409033—dc23 2012017708

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Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in China by Everbest Printing Ltd., through Four Colour Print Group, Louisville, KY Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American 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.

Additional credits: page i, detail of figure 84; pages ii–iii, detail of figure 60; pages iv–v, detail of figure 45; pages vi–vii, detail of figure 33.

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FOR JO

Image is 122%. Not in color in the text.

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On the tribune the bonnet rouge was painted in gray. The royalists started laughing at this gray bonnet rouge, this false room, this cardboard monument, this papier-mâché sanctuary, this Panthéon of mud and spittle. How quickly it was bound to disappear! The columns were of barrel staves, the vaults were of batten, the bas-reliefs were of cement, the entablatures were of pine, the statues were of plaster, the marbles were painted, the murals were canvas; and in the provisional France made the eternal. VICTOR HUGO Quatre-vingt-treize (1874)

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CONTENTS

ix List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii List of Abbreviations 1 Introduction 13

chapter one Made of Money: Transparent Bodies, Authentic Values, Paper Signs

43

chapter two Between States: Passports, Certificates, and Citizens

71

chapter three Revolutionary Models/Model Revolutionaries: Architecture, Print, and Participation at the Festival of the Federation

97

chapter four Performing the Bastille: Pierre-François Palloy and the Memory-Work of the Revolution

119

chapter five Material Futures: Marking Time in a Revolutionary Almanac

143

chapter six Paper Traces: Playing Games with the Revolutionary Past

167 Conclusion 171 Notes 187 Bibliography 203 Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Constitution of 1791, damaged by P.-F. Palloy in May 1793 2 2. Jacques-Louis David, La mort de Joseph Bara 5 3. Letterhead, le directoire du département de la Nièvre à la commission des administrations civiles, police et tribunaux 9 4. Jean-Pierre Droz, assignat, twenty-five sols 15 5. Billet de vingt sols, municipalité de Laval, département de la Mayenne 15 6. Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux, assignat (illuminated from beneath to show “La Nation” watermark), fifteen sous 16 7. O Sacre Dieu—uns bekomm bien die Liberte-Welch ein Wollöben! Es fleust der Milk und die Hönick! Ah ça ira! 19 8. Bon de cinquante livres; Dieu et le Roi 20 9. Assignat of five francs folded in the manner of the Vendéens and the Chouans to read “la mort de la République” 21 10. L’homme aux assignats 22 11. La Bourse protège les agioteurs 23 12. Leonard Schenck and Pieter Schenck II, Mr Jean Law 25 13. Camus et un acolyte accueillent un couple de rentiers 26 14. L’impayable rentier de l’état, que ne suis-je Camus 27 15. Ouf ! 27 16. Jacques-Louis David, Marat assassiné 29 17. Adoration des patriotes, à l’aspect d’un gros-sous, dessinée en France d’après nature l’an (sans argent) 3 de la liberté 30 18. Le roi mangeant des pieds à la Sainte Menehould, le maitre du poste confronte un assignat et reconnait le roi 32 19. L’expirante Targinette 38 20. Cas des assignats, chez l’étranger 39 21. Passport issued to Louis Baraud 44 22. Carle Vernet [inv. del.] and François Godefroy [sculp.], Formulaire du congé absolu 45 23. Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux [inv.] and François-Noel Sellier [sculp.], Projet d’un monument pour consacrer la Révolution 48 24. Passport issued to Augustin Désiré 49 25. Isaac Cruikshank after John Nixon, Le Gourmand 53 26. Anatole Devosge after Jacques-Louis David, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort 56 27. Charles-François-Gabriel Levachez [inv. del. medallion] and Jean Duplessi-Bertaux [inv. del. vignette], Honoré,

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Gabriel, Riquetti, Mirabeau, député de Provence aux États généraux de 1789, mort le 2 avril 1791 57 28. Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Jeanbon Saint-André 58 29. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-representative of the Colonies 60 30. Passport issued to Anne-Louis Girodet 62 31. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Self-Portrait 62 32. Jean Beugnet, Congé absolu, pour passer aux vétérans, délivré à Médart 64 33. Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux [inv.] and Pierre-Alexandre Tardieu [sculp.], assignat, four hundred livres 65 34. Nicolas [inv.] and Delettre [sculp.], Brevet du vainqueur de la Bastille, décerné en vertu du décret de l’Assemblée Nationale du 19 juin 1790 à Pierre Fillon 67 35. Antoine Vestier, Portrait de Latude 68 36. Jean-Jacques Hauer, General Lafayette and Mme. Roland Drawing a Plan for the Festival of Federation in 1791 72 37. Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, Vue du Champ de Mars le 14 juillet 1790 73 38. Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculp.], Fédération générale faite à Paris le 14 juillet 1790 77 39. Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculp.], Les troupes du Champ de Mars partant pour la place Louis XV le 12 juillet 1789 77 40. Étienne Béricourt, Divertissement pendant les travaux préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération 81 41. Les travaux du Champ de Mars, from Almanach de la Fédération de France 82 42. Vue des travaux du Champ de Mars par les parisiens, l’an 1er de la liberté le 12 juillet 1790 83 43. Hubert Robert, Fête de la Fédération au Champ de Mars 87 44. La nation française assistée par M. De Lafayette terrasse le despotisme et les abus du regne feodal qui terrassaient le peuple 89 45. Louis Lecoeur after Jacques-François-Joseph SwebachDesfontaines, Serment fédératif du 14 juillet 1790 90 46. La Fédération faite le 14 juillet 1790, almanach pour 1791 91 47. Cloquet [del.] and Le François [scripsit.], Vue générale

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de la Fédération française prise à vôl d’oiseau au-dessus de Chaillot 92 48. Meusnier, Plan général du Champ de Mars et du nouveau cirque 92 49. Antoine Donchery, Portrait de Pierre-François Palloy 98 50. Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Modèle de la Bastille 100 51. Certificat d’artiste, et d’ouvrier en bâtiment 101 52. Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Stone from the Bastille, with Attached Plan of the Bastille 104 53. Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Medal Made from Bastille Remnants 105 54. Antoine Cosme Giraud, Le XIV juillet MVCCLXXXX 106 55. Vue de la fête donnée sur le plan de la Bastille 108 56. Le dégel de la nation 109 57. Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, Modèle de la Bastille 113 58. Hubert Robert, La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition 115 59. Attaque de la petite Bastille 116 60. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution 120 61. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Calendrier républicain 125 62. Louis Lecoeur, La Constitution française 125 63. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of upper section) 127 64. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération 129 65. Montagne élevée au champ de la réunion pour la fête de l’Être Suprême le 20 prairial l’an 2eme 130 66. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of pamphlet seller) 131 67. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, La croisée 132 68. Jean-Germain Drouais, Soldat romain blessé 133 69. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié

aux amis de la Constitution (detail showing figures on right-hand side of print) 135 70. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of “marble”) 135 71. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of newspaper vendor, version with calendar attached) 137 72. Label for Pharmaceutical Goods Sold by L. Chedeville 138 73. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, La paix. A Bonaparte pacificateur 140 74. J. Benizy dit. Jean Dubuisson [del. sculp.], Valeur des assignats et autres papiers monnaies 144 75. François Bonneville, Tableau d’assignats avec portraits de victimes et de profiteurs 144 76. A. W. Huffner, Verbrennung der Assignaten in Paris am 19ten Febr. 1796 145 77. Les députés de la Gironde condamnés à mort jetant des assignats au peuple qui les déchire 148 78. Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculpt.], Statue de Louis XIV abatue 150 79. Design for a Circular Tabatière Lid 156 80. Villeicht enthüllen sich der Weissen vorsicht woege; auch selbst durch Robespierre 158 81. Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Trompe-l’Oeil Table with Playing Cards 159 82. Tableau d’une partie des crimes commis pendant la Révolution et particulièrement sous le règne de la Convention nationale 163 83. Assignat (illuminated from beneath to show watermark), five hundred livres 164 84. François Bonneville, Tableau des assignats (avec cartes à jouer et lunettes) 164 85. Bailly conduit Voltaire et autres précurseurs de la Révolution française vers la cité future 168

x | illustrations

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would have remained a provisional object itself were it not for the guidance and support of numerous individuals over many years. I have a lot of people to thank, and wholeheartedly so, although limitations of space prevent me from being as specific as I would like. My first debt is to Helen Weston and Tom Gretton, two remarkable teachers and writers who ignited my interest in the French Revolution, encouraged me to pursue this subject, and offered tremendous insight, inspiration, and assistance along the way. My colleagues at University College London (UCL) have provided a model for critically engaged thought, intellectual exchange, and collegiality. Conversations over many years with David Bindman, Warren Carter, Emma Chambers, T. J. Demos, Diana Dethloff, Natasha Eaton, Mechthild Fend, Briony Fer, Charles Ford, Andrea Fredericksen, Tamar Garb, Nicholas Grindle, Andrew Hemingway, Sarah James, Petra Lange-­ Berndt, Maria H. Loh, Martin Perks, Rose Marie San Juan, Stephanie Schwartz, Libby Sheldon, Frederic Schwartz, Frances Stracey, and Alison Wright have shaped and continue to shape my thinking on this and numerous other topics. It was a particular honor to be invited to present some of the new material in this book as the 2010 Tomás Harris Lectures at UCL; the feedback I received on those occasions helped me formulate several key aspects of chapters 4 and 5. I would also like to thank my former colleagues in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, as well as those elsewhere in Montreal, where much of this book was written, in particular Darin Barney, Susan Dalton, Peggy Davis, Dominic Hardy, Cecily Hilsdale, Amelia Jones, Nikola von Merveldt, Tom Mole, Andrew Piper, Hajime Nakatani, Carrie Rentschler, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, Will Straw, and Angela Vanhaelen. Catherine Clinger, Nicholas Dew, Mary Hunter, and Stuart MacMillan provided friendship, fun, food, and discussion and made my time in Canada an absolute pleasure.

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For friendship, collaboration, conversation, and advice of various kinds, in various places, and over different periods of time, many thanks are also due to Steven Adams, Emma Barker, John Barrell, Serge Bianchi, Yve-Alain Bois, Juliet Carey, Richard Clay, Nancy W. Collins, Julia Douthwaite, Jane Elliott, Alan Forrest, Amy Freund, Anthony Geraghty, Mark Hallett, Claudette Hould, Ben Kafka, Anne Lafont, Valerie Mainz, Sarah Monks, Satish Padiyar, Magali Philippe, Rolf Reichardt, Emily Richardson, Harriet Riches, Adrian Rifkin, John David Rhodes, Vanessa Schwartz, Matthew Shaw, Susan Siegfried, Christina Smylitopoulos, Rebecca Spang, Tamara Trodd, Sarah Victoria Turner, Dror Wahrman, Sue Walker, Alicia WeisbergRoberts, Bronwen Wilson, Alan Wintermute, and Beth S. Wright. Lynn Hunt’s work has been an inspiration for many years, and I have valued tremendously her incredibly perceptive and generous responses to my work. Colin Jones, Jann Matlock, Todd Porterfield, Katie Scott, and Richard Wrigley read all or part of the text in its various incarnations. Their guidance and immensely thoughtful comments have been hugely appreciated and have significantly shaped the text that follows. Katherine Crawford and Erika Naginski both read the manuscript in its entirety and offered remarkably engaged and helpful suggestions. Any errors that remain are, of course, entirely my own. Aspects of this book were presented during the course of its preparation at a diverse range of conferences, symposia, and lectures, and it always came away better as a result—I am grateful to all those who have invited me to present this material and to all the participants and audiences at these events. Many thanks are also due to my students in Montreal and London, on whom I regularly tested parts of this book, for their thoughtful and engaged responses. I would like to thank the AHRC, Royal Historical Society, Society for the Study of French History, UCL History of Art Department and Graduate School, the Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, and the Faculty of Arts at

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McGill University for funding my research at various stages. The award of a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Foundation came at a pivotal time, personally and intellectually, and made possible the research and writing of a significant part of the manuscript, while an idyllic term as a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, facilitated its completion. I would like to thank both of these institutions and acknowledge the support of the Herodotus Fund for making the latter fellowship possible. I am also very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and to the College Art Association for the award of a Millard Meiss Publication Grant that enabled the production of the book. The staffs of numerous institutions have been crucial to the research for this project, and I would like to recognize some of them here. In Britain: The British Library, British Museum, Institute of Historical Research, National Art Library, Warburg Institute, Waddesdon Manor, the J. B. Morrell Library at the University of York, UCL Art Museum, and the University of London Library. In Canada: Richard Virr and Ann Marie Holland at McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec. In the United States: Julie Mellby at the Graphic Arts Collection, and the Firestone Library and Marquand Library at Princeton University; the Historical Studies and Social Sciences Library, Institute for Advanced Study; the Newberry Library, Chicago, and the Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, Cornell University Library. In France: Philippe de Carbonnières at the Musée Carnavalet, Alan Marshall at the Musée de l’Imprimerie in Lyon, and the staffs of the Archives Nationales, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Archives de Paris, Bibliothèque Histo-

rique de la Ville de Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Centre National des Arts et Métiers, and Musée Français de la Carte à Jouer at Issy-les-Moulineaux. I would like to reserve a special thank-you for Alain Chevalier, Véronique Despine, and Annick LeGall at the Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille. Without their facilitation of this marvelous and beautifully situated resource, this book would never have got off the ground. My editor at Penn State University Press, Eleanor H. Goodman, has been wonderfully encouraging since day one, and I have had numerous occasions to be grateful for her efficiency and wisdom as this project has progressed. I would also like to thank Jennifer Norton, Danny Bellett, and Kate Woodford at Penn State University Press and Christine Hosler and Julie Van Pelt of AHPI for expertly steering the book to publication. Part of chapter 1 was published as “The Currency of Caricature in Revolutionary France” in The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838, edited by Todd Porterfield (Ashgate, 2010); a section of the final chapter appeared as “Trompel’Oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory After the Terror” in Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (2007); and an amended version of chapter 5 was published in The Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (2010). I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these articles for their permission to reproduce material here. I dedicate this book to my small but perfectly formed family, with more love and gratitude than it is remotely possible for me to express here. Not a word of this book could or would have been written without the love, support, and inspiring example of my mother, Elizabeth Taws, or without the love and companionship of Jo Applin, my first, last, and always best reader.

xii | acknowledgments

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ABBREVIATIONS

AN AP APP BHVP BL BM BN MC MNAM MRF

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Archives Nationales, Paris Archives de Paris, Paris Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Paris British Library, London British Museum, London Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Musée Carnavalet, Paris Musée National des Arts et Métiers, Paris Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille

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INTRODUCTION

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At midday on 5 May 1793, a crowd gathered on the Place de la Bastille in eastern Paris to observe a solemn and unmistakably revolutionary ritual. In front of several revolutionary legislators, hangers-on, and assorted observers, workers unearthed a large wooden box that had been buried in the center of the Bastille site less than a year earlier, on 14 July 1792, the third anniversary of the storming of the prison.1 Installed beneath a stone from the Bastille by the builder-entrepreneur PierreFrançois Palloy, the demolisher of the prison and a self-styled “patriot,” the container comprised part of the foundation for a monument to liberty that was proposed for the site but that never, in fact, saw the light of day. The box functioned as a kind of time capsule, for it contained a motley assortment of objects, all of which provided material evidence of the sweeping political and social changes brought about by the Revolution. Although it might be expected that these objects were vestiges of the Ancien Régime, in fact few of them predated the Revolution itself, while those that did had been remade as overtly revolutionary. Included in Palloy’s box were an assignat, or paper banknote, of fifty livres and several coins of varying values; four medals made from the chains of the Bastille, representing the ci-devant king, his ministers, and the deputies of both the National Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly; and a copper-bound copy of the Constitution of 1791 (fig. 1). In addition, a bronze plaque engraved with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the Constitution, a portrait of Louis XVI (who had been executed on 21 January 1793, just over three months before the box was unearthed) carved into another Bastille stone, and effigies of the legislators Jean-Sylvain Bailly and Claude-Emmanuel de Pastoret were also packed into this underground casket.2 Following speeches by the future consul Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and the deputy Louis-Joseph Charlier, the politically outmoded contents of the container were excavated by order of the

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National Convention, and, in a reenactment of the demolition on the same site in 1789, they were smashed to pieces beneath the “national hammer” by the same Palloy who had put them in place the previous year.3 Yet despite the iconoclastic rhetoric that governed this event and the ritualized erasure of the recent past it set in play, these objects were not simply destroyed.4 Instead, their bruised remains were piled back into the same cedar box and transported immediately to the National Archives, founded three years previously, where they were placed under the guard of the chief archivist Armand Gaston Camus. Conspicuously but not irretrievably damaged, these obsolete fragments remain there to this day.5 The Bastille site, on the other hand, remained empty, despite the hopes for a future characterized by the production and display of effective and enduring symbolic objects that were no doubt in the air that spring day in 1793. It was not until 1840 that it received its permanent monument in the form of a column commemorating the Revolution of 1830.6 Revolutions are forced to do stuff with debris, to sort and reframe not only the leftover remnants of the regimes they set out to destroy but the outdated, embarrassing evidence of their earlier selves.7 Becoming a revolutionary, to steal a phrase from the historian Timothy Tackett, required the production, and more pressingly, the reproduction, of things.8 This tale of revolutionary uncertainty regarding the Revolution’s historical legacy was not an isolated incident but was typical of attempts to use material objects to narrate and, more important, to actively constitute transformations in the temporal and political order of 1790s France. Such responsiveness to the contingencies of the historical process came to typify revolutionaries’ selfconscious performance of their unique situation in time. While it is tempting to read the exhumation of Palloy’s memory-box as indicating the inability of its contents to secure the Revolution’s

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2 | the politics of the provisional

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Figure 1 Constitution of 1791, damaged by P.-F. Palloy in May 1793. Copper and parchment. Archives Nationales de France, Paris, AE/I/9/4. Photo: Atelier Photographique des Archives Nationales

“meaning,” longevity is not the only way in which objects acquire currency. Rather, this book will argue, visual practice in revolutionary France was characterized by the production and circulation of a range of transitional, provisional, ephemeral, and half-made images and objects, whose frequently uncertain, fleeting, or makeshift materiality paradoxically provided the most effective ongoing means of negotiating the historical significance of the Revolution. Occupying a nebulous space between, and overlapping with, the traditional prerogatives of divinely ordained kingship and the new social order of nineteenth-century modernity, France in the 1790s was characterized by frequent shifts in political authority and an embrace of the new that regularly ran up against a persistent desire, shared by revolutionaries of all political orientations, to complete the Revolution. The prospect of revolutionary permanence (if not “permanent revolution”) was a difficult one to realize, the stabilization and perpetuation of the Revolution requiring a delicate combination of stasis and ongoing incompletion. Throughout the 1790s revolutionaries recognized the potential for art to negotiate this impasse, and the call for the production of enduring monuments, paintings, and public spaces dedicated to the memory of the Revolution came from all points on the revolutionary political spectrum. This was often framed in terms of a perceived distance from the ephemeral displays, dissimulative feints, masquerades, and intrigues considered typical of both Ancien-Régime political culture more generally and the bourgeois art and elite luxury objects that dominated the market in eighteenth-century France.

However, the radical destabilization of systems of patronage and display that accompanied the momentous events of 1789 had engendered massive changes in the conditions under which artists worked.9 Shortages of materials and money, combined with a volatile political atmosphere, meant that it was increasingly difficult for painters, sculptors, and architects to carry on as they had before the Revolution. Durability was not easily achieved, and few large-scale artworks or projects for lasting monuments were ever completed, although many were proposed. With some notable exceptions, the space was filled with the production of transient, ephemeral installations, often made for festivals or other revolutionary commemorations, as well as a wide range of new kinds of visual production that the Revolution had either initiated or transformed. These included the eclectic output of official and nonofficial print publishers—calendars, almanacs, paper money, identity cards, newspapers, bureaucratic vignettes, laws, forms, caricatures, playing cards, portraits, songs, topographies, and images of revolutionary events—alongside numerous other souvenirs, relics, paintings, drawings, plans, clothing, and furniture. They provided multiple opportunities for artists and other cultural producers to work in newly straitened circumstances and, often, to experiment in a manner that would not have been possible previously. In portraying the Revolution as “a sort of lacuna, a deserted and sterile space for the history of art,” Antoine-­Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, the antiquarian and neo­classical theorist responsible for the conversion of the Panthéon, that monument to the persistence of memory, set the tone for the subsequent

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reception of much revolutionary visual practice.10 Although the diversity of revolutionary art has long been recognized, a focus on a few elite artists has contributed to the persistence of a surprisingly tenacious set of assumptions about the indifferent quality of revolutionary artistic practice or, worse, the Revolution’s status as an outright negation of art. With some notable and influential exceptions, art history has tended to isolate for discussion a few key oeuvres from this period, privileging in particular the work of Jacques-Louis David and his students.11 While I am aware of crucial differences in production and use, my aim is not to reinforce the distinction between this kind of institutionally valorized art and the images and objects once described by Linda Nochlin as “an odd assortment of secondrate portraits [. . .] historiated toby jugs and indecipherable coarse-grained prints.”12 On the contrary, in examining how revolutionaries attempted to reconfigure their understanding of society, politics, and history via an engagement with the mechanics of transience, it is crucial that we pay attention to how demonstrably “artistic” works intersected with a diverse field of images conventionally understood to be outside the sphere of art. David and other academic painters were also, undoubtedly, implicated in the politics of provisionality, and not just in terms of a diversified practice that led to such artists designing everything from playing cards and letterheads to clothing, festivals, and theater sets during these years. Take, for instance, David’s 1794 painting of the child-martyr Joseph Bara (fig. 2), a work that for reasons both intentional and happenstance claims a middle ground between the past and future, between two incompatible regimes, between male and female, between childhood and adulthood, and between life and death.13 All of this is rendered in a feathery, irresolute brushwork that breaks down into hazy formlessness at the borders of the image, applied to a canvas that was intended to be paraded through the streets at a revolutionary festival that

was planned in full but that never took place because of the downfall of the political regime whose ideology of self-sacrifice it supported. David’s work exemplifies, perhaps more than any other painting, the political stakes of provisionality in 1790s France. It demonstrates the extent to which constructions of subjectivity, gender, revolutionary politics, and artistic style were all subject, in different but overlapping ways, to the unpredictable effects of the Revolution’s adamant forward drive. However, the belatedness of the painting, its fall into obsolescence before it had the opportunity to realize its purpose, and its teetering position between utopian future and revolutionary history only tell us part of the story of how provisional images and objects could be more than the outmoded wreckage of discontinued political systems. Indeed, the vast majority of visual materials that conveyed the Revolution’s symbolic message around France, whether issued by the state or private interests, were mobile, ephemeral, and multiple. Despite the revolutionary desire for permanent monuments equal to those of Rome or Greece, it was assignats, passports, games, caricatures, certificates, posters, souvenirs, clothing, and engravings—precisely the kind of things that made their way into Palloy’s container— that played the greatest role in transmitting visually the message of the Revolution, although not always in ways that were readily understood or easily managed by either their producers or their multiple consumers. Added to these were the rituals, performances, and impromptu spaces of display, exchange, and forgery, which were even more provisional in nature. As the story of Palloy’s box on the site of the Bastille shows, the visual culture of the Revolution could at various points provide the bedrock for the historical imagination of the Revolution and at the same time be subject to radical and regular revision. It is a central claim of this book that the temporary character of much of the Revolution’s material culture is not

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Figure 2 Jacques-Louis David, La mort de Joseph Bara, 1794. Oil on canvas. Musée Calvet, Avignon, Inv. 846.3.1. Photo: Fondation Calvet

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best understood as a sign of the failure of revolutionaries to produce images and objects of lasting importance. On the contrary, it points to a dynamic, contradictory process of experimentation that had profound implications for how revolutionaries became constructed as political subjects. Widely reproduced, ephemeral, “in-between” images and objects made during the French Revolution were, I argue, a primary site for the formation of both individual subjectivities and wider national or political community identities, and they were at the heart of debates on the nature of political authenticity and historical memory. Usually, of course, permanence was the desired outcome, of both revolutionary politics and visual production—witness the enthusiasm for a monument at the Bastille. However, the means by which permanence could be achieved were not straightforward and were regularly undermined by material, economic, and political constraints. As provisional images began to lose their meaning or value, or were recycled, destroyed, sequestered, or decommissioned, revolutionaries (and those with alternative political affiliations) were forced to think tactically about corporeal, political, and material legitimacy and, in so doing, to consider their relationship to the new ways of understanding time initiated by the Revolution. Thinking about material durability was one of the key ways in which revolutionaries thought about duration, and it was consequently crucial to how they imagined the place of the Revolution in history. In short, provisional images and objects had currency as producers of meanings that played an active role in shaping their world. Many of these works were explicitly “useful” objects, made for functional rather than overtly aesthetic ends. Operating in the here and now of the political present, some were necessarily conceived as flexible and evolving, a means to an end, while others came to be considered provisional only after their passing. These images and objects, most of which were produced in quantity, were often made in full conscious-

ness of their status as commodities. The currency of these works, which was, in many cases, inseparable from their status as currency, resided too in their ability to circulate—as reproduced items that could be owned, transmitted, or viewed by a critical mass of individuals—and in their potential to operate as mediums of both change and exchange. Rather than provide a comprehensive inventory of revolutionary visual culture or long-since-vanished objects (an impossible task in any case), The Politics of the Provisional is an attempt to assess critically the visual politics of revolutionary France. The studies on which each chapter is based draw out distinct and conflicting themes within the political and visual culture of the period, interrogating an archive that is layered, heterogeneous, and contradictory. For reasons of coherence I have concentrated for the most part on images produced in Paris, where the majority of existing images were produced, sold, or legislated for; although at several points this has been neither possible nor desirable, and I am conscious that Paris does not stand for the Revolution as a whole. While ordered thematically rather than chronologically, the book focuses on a conventional “revolutionary decade” from 1789 to 1799, with some porosity at either end, yet it goes without saying that the narrow historical frame provided by conventions of date limitation is, while seductive, potentially misleading. This is all the more apparent in the context of a temporally complex process such as the French Revolution, whose origins are found long before the storming of the Bastille and whose significance expands well beyond it. Despite the claims made for them by revolutionaries, almost all of the objects discussed in this book had significant precedents earlier in the eighteenth century, if not before. Few scholars would now subscribe to a reading of the French Revolution as a rupture so absolute that it obliterated all signs of the recent past, and I certainly do not wish to lay claim to a

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reading of the Revolution as a fully autonomous, coherent historical unit. Rather, the question of how revolutionaries dealt with continuities, both from the previous regime and from earlier moments in the history of the Revolution, is at the core of this book. However, alongside these broader historical shifts, it is essential that we acknowledge the specific temporalities of the works under discussion. Material objects are complex things that have histories of their own. Even the most transient, fragile objects tend to stick around for some time. In fact—and this paradox is at the heart of any analysis of the “ephemeral”—these objects that fall apart or are destroyed in great numbers often turn out to be as durable as their ostensibly more secure counterparts, for they are amenable to preservation in both personal collections and state archives.14 In many cases, the objects I discuss—money, identity documents, and festivals, for instance—all became more formalized in the Napoleonic period than during the First Republic, increasing in worldwide importance with the rise of industrial capitalism and the nineteenth century’s cycle of revolutions. None of this would have been possible, however, without the first French Revolution’s eagerness to “regenerate” its symbolic language and all areas of administration, art, and ritual. Producers of revolutionary images may have drawn upon long-standing visual traditions when making their works, but that does not mean these images were mere recapitulations of all that had gone before. Continuities yes, but ruptures too. Paper money may have preceded the Revolution, but the assignat was something quite new. A long tradition of royal and religious festivals undoubtedly informed revolutionary festivals, but not one of them commemorated a revolution. Ex-votos and relics were medieval in origin, but Palloy’s Bastille relics were singular to their historical moment. Almost every culture in history has had its fair share of transient, interim, or speculative images and objects, but in

France in the 1790s they took on a heightened significance as the very substance of the Revolution. As much as any artwork, these objects deserve examination in the historically specific context of their production and use. While the provisional has been frequently taken to stand for the degraded ephemerality of the Ancien Régime—not least during the Revolution itself—since the early nineteenth century it has also signified the effervescent transience of a modernity the Revolution arguably brought to realization. Over a decade before Victor Hugo’s fictional description of how “in the provisional France made the eternal,” Charles Baudelaire had conceptualized modernity, in his famous essay on Constantin Guys, as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”15 Baudelaire began this essay with a reflection on how the work of Philibert-Louis Debucourt, an artist discussed at length in chapter 5, was particular to its historical moment. By 1863 Debucourt’s work was interesting to Baudelaire precisely because of its “pastness,” much as modern art was of value for its “essential quality of being present.”16 Yet although the dialectical character of modernity that Baudelaire outlined certainly seems to speak to the works under discussion here, we have good reason to be cautious of simplistic readings of the Revolution’s modernity. Indeed, it is crucial to recognize that despite a widespread contemporary recognition of the Revolution’s unprecedented breach with the past, its aftereffects were often not anticipated by those responsible for it, newly politicized subjects whose expectations, ideas, and forms of expression were those of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the Revolution did transform inexorably the relation between made things and the political field, not least because, as Richard Wrigley has astutely observed in his study of revolutionary dress, it marked an ill-defined crossroads between a world where nothing was thrown away and a world introduction | 7

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of modern consumerism where obsolescence, transience, and disposal were intrinsic to the status of the object.17 Consequently, each chapter of this book figures as a conjuncture where a set of images comes into focus, often from a mass of similar or related images. Indeed, in many cases, the very excess of these images has paradoxically limited their visibility as objects of study. Received as either functional objects outside the terrain of “art” or as art objects that address transient subject matter, these images are susceptible to a banal marginalization as “ephemera.” Yet these normative, unitary categories of “revolutionary visual culture” or “ephemeral image” have failed to account for the interactions between such forms of representation and other more established media and genres, from Academic history painting to sculpture or architecture. Moreover, as indexes of a political field that was itself far from stable, these images remind us too that binary separations between “revolutionary” and “counterrevolutionary” image making are limited in their usefulness, as such positions were far from fixed and were the product of processes of struggle and appropriation between politically varied and inharmonious groups. This book works from an assumption that any history of revolutionary visual culture demands a reading of counterrevolutionary visual production, and that the two were at all points mutually constitutive categories. What is at stake here is a politics of the provisional that is less about tracking shifting allegiances on a neat spectrum between royalist and Jacobin than it is about visuality itself as a form of political praxis. Despite the ostensible marginality of much of the material dealt with here, many of the images in the chapters that follow were produced by the state or were images that responded to or reflected administrative transformations of the political structure. Recognizing the power dynamics and genre hierarchies of so-called ephemeral works allows us to complicate notions of “high” and “low” in artistic practice. However, the reception of such images was neither

straightforward nor uncontested. While the production of images in large quantities by the revolutionary legislature gives us a good idea of what successive governments desired to make known or change in the French people, at points it also allows us access to how people responded to the revolutionary state and what they recognized or subverted in the images made in their name. Forging and folding, attaching and adapting, collecting and carrying, remodeling and renaming were all strategies by which citizens could transform the function and appearance of the images and objects they encountered. Carefully scratching the ink away from the paper of a letterhead to reflect a change in political authority—in one example, issued at Nevers in messidor year III, “la mort” has been replaced by “la justice,” while “imperisable” has been crossed out altogether (fig. 3)—may have prolonged the existence and utility of the document, but it also exposed how works could change over time and recorded the interaction between individuals and images. By engaging with visual culture, public spectacles, private entertainments, or state bureaucracy, revolutionaries of all convictions situated themselves in relation to revolutionary politics. This had a historical dimension that was apparent from the start of the Revolution but that intensified as it progressed and that exceeded the boundaries of France itself, as colonial subjects also occupied a critical stance with regard to the images and objects of the metropolitan Revolution. It is perhaps unsurprising then that historians have, with some notable exceptions, sometimes been more willing than art historians have been to engage with this diverse body of material, although their focus has for the most part leaned toward printed images representing prominent revolutionary episodes or symbols. There has also been a tendency among some historians to use images as illustrations of event- or value-based narratives rather than addressing the role of images in the construction of those narratives. However, Lynn

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Figure 3 Letterhead, le directoire du département de la Nièvre à la commission des administrations civiles, police et tribunaux, 1795. Engraving and typography with manuscript additions. Archives Nationales de France, Paris, AN F7 3494. Photo: author

Hunt, writing in a fall 2009 issue of French Historical Studies that reflected on the state of revolutionary studies twenty years on from the bicentennial (a time when many important publications and exhibitions appeared), argues that the study of images may be one of the most productive future directions in French revolutionary studies, as it might provide us with ways of understanding how “people came quite literally to see the world differently.”18 In particular, Hunt suggests we develop new ways of thinking about subjectivity and the social through the examination of multiple rather than individual images. With that in mind, this book attempts to provide a set of criteria for thinking about the visual culture of revolutionary France that moves beyond what it represented into issues of how it represented and what that representation made possible (or impossible). In doing so, this book necessarily

casts a wider net than the printed material that has been the primary focus of much important work conducted by scholars including Hunt, Claudette Hould, Joan Landes, Rolf Reichardt, and Hubertus Kohle, arguing instead that the precariousness of representation in revolutionary France was constituted on an intermedial field of exchange between a range of different kinds of objects and images.19 The book begins with an analysis of the revolutionary assignat. A bond based on the value of “reclaimed” clerical land, the assignat operated as a national currency until 1796. Situating the assignat against other forms of visual production, from caricature to history painting, as well as the counterfeits that challenged its authority, I examine how the materiality of the paper notes proved a testing ground for the authenticity of other kinds of representation. Considerations of this sort had introduction | 9

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an effect on subjects as well as objects, and in chapter 2 I examine the precarious interactions between citizens and their printed papers. Focusing on passports, certificates, and other documents, I investigate the ways in which they articulated belonging and exclusion, often understood in terms of evolving racial, gendered, or class-based typologies. The theme of mobility is developed further in chapters 3 and 4, which also explore differences between provisionality in two or three dimensions. Chapter 3 examines prints representing the first Festival of the Federation, held in Paris on 14 July 1790. Printed images provided a means of negotiating the problematic destruction or recommissioning of the ephemeral structures erected for the festival and a way of rendering permanent the performative, mobile aspect of the event. Chapter 4 focuses on Palloy’s transformation of the ruins of the Bastille, in particular his production of souvenir objects recast in the shape of the prison. These troubling objects engage head-on with the issue of revolutionary time, the subject of chapter 5, which concentrates on revolutionary calendars and almanacs, in particular a single color print by Philibert-Louis Debucourt. Chapter 6 returns to the assignat and a series of trompe l’oeil prints published in the aftermath of the notes’ destruction in 1796, many of which contained hidden silhouette profiles of the executed royal family or prominent revolutionaries in the negative space surrounding other objects. I argue that these images, which track a history of the Revolution through its paper traces, are a response to revolutionary trauma, and consider how motifs of ruin, chance, and dissimulation permeated postrevolutionary discourse. The final two chapters engage most explicitly with processes of historical imagining and recollection, prediction and recall, and are characterized by an effacement of these differences in trompe l’oeil and other illusionistic techniques, where the blurring of material and temporal boundaries organized both the promise of a revolution to come (Debu-

court’s Almanach national in 1790) and the remembrance of a revolution past (the representation of assignats in 1796 and 1804). Images such as these demonstrate the extent to which past, present, and future were not mutually exclusive categories in 1790s France but frequently intersected with one another and often did so within the same image. The Politics of the Provisional sets out to mediate these antagonistic positions, examining how, short on time and money, revolutionary artists and legislators developed ad hoc, tactical forms of provisional representation that provided new ways of imagining and performing political agency. The Revolution’s evident historical tensions can illuminate our understanding of revolutionary visual culture, but this visual culture also sheds light on the historical process itself. In looking at how the people of the Revolution “saw things,” we have often ignored the objects that made them most aware, on a daily basis, of the ambiguities presented by the visual and of their own precarious positions as spectators. Thinking seriously about revolutionary visual culture demands that we engage with the rich variety of things made to be seen that did not explicitly reference locatable, identifiable revolutionary events and themes, providing comfortable “illustration” for the historical narrative, but that we think too about the contingent, the multiple, the marginal, and the central, the nonfigurative, nonart, nonrevolutionary. How, we must ask, did authentic “revolutionariness” develop through the appropriation of prerevolutionary material? How was visual culture, in its broadest sense, implicated in what it meant to be “postrevolutionary,” as far as such a term may be thought to be meaningful? In revolutionary France, we know, everything was rethought— viewed through the lens of the Revolution, all aspects of life were reimagined, and even familiar objects and practices acquired new resonances. Given this temporal (not to mention political) instability, how could revolutionaries tell the difference between what was “true” and what was “false”?

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Authenticity and its close counterpart, transparency, became terms of increasing significance for people, ideas, and things in 1790s France, although their meanings were far from stable, for they required recourse to criteria, inherited from the past, that were no longer available or useful. Reproductive media in particular—but not only prints—worked to broker the relationship between the past, present, and future, securing the authority of new concepts and practices in some

instances and challenging them elsewhere. These images and objects, at once asserting truth claims through repetition and undoing them by their unfixed relationship to a single standard of legitimacy, soon became so much outmoded, curious debris, yet they materialized the radical reformulation of time the Revolution had engendered and pointed toward new ways of imagining the future.

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CHAPTER ONE

MADE OF MONEY TRANSPARENT BODIES, AUTHENTIC VALUES, PAPER SIGNS

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In France at the end of the eighteenth century, few objects articulated so vividly the Revolution’s uneasy position with regard to its own permanence as the assignat, a government bond based on nationalized clerical land that subsequently became a revolutionary paper currency. First issued in 1789, the assignat lasted for just over six years until, after catastrophic hyperinflation and eventual withdrawal, the notes were destroyed on the ci-devant Place Vendôme in February 1796, along with the technology used for their production. The introduction of the assignat had provided the revolutionary state with a means to stabilize a precarious financial situation and, less directly, to transmit the Revolution’s shifting iconography throughout France. As an object that in due course made apparent the transfer of authority from royal to Republican power, via the removal of the king’s profile and its replacement with a wide variety of Republican signs, the assignat bore a great deal of symbolic as well as economic capital. Despite its apparent transience, it was probably the most widely circulated image of the revolutionary period, issued in such vast quantities that publishers of books and other printed materials were severely compromised by the lack of available paper.1 However, for much of their short existence assignats struggled to sustain equivalence with metal coinage, and they were regularly criticized for their material fragility in comparison to more solid signs of value. The assignat was a symptom— and, for some, a primary cause—of the failure of the French revolutionary economy.2 The authority of the assignat was undermined by its status as ephemeral printed paper, and from the time of its introduction the Revolution’s enemies considered the assignat’s insubstantiality a reflection on the political transience of the Revolution itself. The instability of the assignat was exacerbated by endemic counterfeiting, especially from abroad, that rendered all paper notes suspect. Less ruinously but equally important, the symbolic worth of

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assignats was sabotaged by prints that satirized paper money, images whose unsteady engagement with the representative problems posed by the assignat forms the main subject of this chapter. Challenges such as these encouraged a sustained scrutiny of the material appearance of the assignat. Covered with a sometimes bewildering range of visual and textual information, assignats were made to be looked at—to be held up to the light and pored over. Sometimes, as with one twentyfive sols note from 1792, which featured a prominent, radiating eye at the top, they even looked straight back (fig. 4).3 At the ceremony marking the assignat’s destruction, Minister of Finances Ramel-Nogaret claimed that “the assignats made the Revolution. They brought about the destruction of orders and of privileges, they overturned the throne and founded the Republic.”4 Although his hyperbolic eulogy smacked of political spin, it pointed nonetheless to the very real historical agency of the assignat. As early as 1792, Louis-Sébastien Mercier had similarly recognized the importance of the confiscation of church properties, noting how “this unique resource consolidated the power of the National Assembly, in that it destroyed the hopes of those who desired its dissolution in order to perpetuate the Ancien Régime and its abuses.”5 On 2 November 1789, interpreting in its favor article seventeen of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which held that “the right to property being inviolable and sacred, no one ought to be deprived of it, except where public necessity, legally determined, clearly demands it,” the National Assembly decreed that “all the ecclesiastical properties are at the nation’s disposal,” a move that paved the way for the issue of paper money.6 Church lands represented almost a third of France and, although their actual value has been disputed, it is clear that they provided an immediate and substantial source of capital for the nascent revolutionary government. Initially conceived as a temporary measure, the assignat was an interest-bearing bond that was

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supposed to be withdrawn in 1791 after the first sales of national properties had raised enough for the revolutionary Caisse de l’Extraordinaire—an institution set up in December 1789 to issue assignats and manage the sale of church lands— to repay the short-term loan owed by the government to the Caisse d’Escompte, the bank founded by Necker and Turgot in 1776.7 This circulation of arrears anticipated the corresponding shift from clerical or aristocratic authority to revolutionary sovereignty. Accompanied by diverse billets de confiance (promissory notes issued by employers and other authorities to make up for an initial shortage of printed assignats), the notes became essential to the economic survival and political consciousness of the Revolution, and in April 1790 they became an official national currency. Not all responses to the introduction of assignats and subsequent large issues of ever-smaller denominations were as favorable as those of Ramel-Nogaret and Mercier. The bad memory of John Law’s ill-fated bank, based on a paper money scheme, resurfaced noisily in the claims of anti-assignat politicians and pamphleteers, who mocked the flimsy materiality of the notes as a sign of their seemingly inevitable economic precariousness. The psychological inheritance of Law’s disastrous release of paper money in 1716 and the collapse of the Mississippi Bubble in 1720 seemed to provide a premonition of the depreciation that was to await the assignat.8 In the 1790s there are accounts of Law’s failed banknotes found attached to primitive pillories in rural areas, an indication of the anthropomorphic potential of money but also, more particularly, of the reproach and suspicion with which paper money continued to be held in France.9 This perceived lack of stability was not helped by repeated delays in the printing of new assignats, brought about by the increasingly massive quantities of notes required and, in response to counterfeiting, the complicated group effort of their assemblage. This meant that employers, départements, com-

munes, patriotic associations, and other payment bodies were forced to compensate individuals by other means.10 The billets de confiance that resulted were to be directly exchangeable for assignats upon their arrival. Although a date limit on the validity of these notes was set at 1 January 1793, it was repeatedly extended, and they remained in use until the start of year IV, shortly before the withdrawal of the assignat.11 The billets de confiance add a further layer of hybridity to the singular designation “assignat.” Maurice Muszynski estimates that fifty-five hundred different billets were issued in fifteen hundred communes between 1790 and 1793, a credible figure given the broad array of sources from which they issued.12 The billets were printed on a variety of supports, usually card or paper of varying colors. Playing cards were often used for this purpose, a traditional promise of payment adapted to new circumstances. As their production was not subject to legislative interference, billets de confiance appeared in a wide range of designs, often carrying the manuscript addition of the bearer’s name or the issuing authority. The billets were commonly horizontal in design, organized within a border that could be extremely simple or, in emulation of the assignats that were to follow, ornately complex, with many stages in between (fig. 5). Revolutionary symbolism—liberty caps, fasces, cockerels of vigilance, and slogans or songs from popular culture, such as “ça ira”—appeared sporadically on the notes, while others highlighted the site of issue.13 The variety of titles given to these notes also led to some confusion, for traditional bons (paper notes issued by merchants to make up for a shortage in small change) appeared alongside mandats (government-issued payment), a term that was to gain a specific currency of its own following the withdrawal of the assignats and their replacement by a new type of paper note, the mandat territorial, in the year IV. Given such diversity and a lack of control over their reception or verification, these billets were susceptible to counterfeiting, which, ironically,

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enhanced their lack of uniformity, as issuing authorities sought to make their notes more complex. The billets de confiance indicate the potential problems raised by the Revolution’s practice of material substitution. Standing in for the assignat, which itself stood for a piece of nationalized land, they demonstrated the variability of the Revolution’s visual output and the extent to which images issued by the state might coincide with more demotic forms of visual production. This fusion was rarely acknowledged by revolutionary rhetoric on the subject, especially the numerous laws that determined the historical narrative of the assignat with such apparent finality. The assignat, understood as a heterogeneous, problematic field of interrelated images, was inevitably subject to contestation; its authority conceived and received in visual terms, it came to be considered either a representation of a transformed and transparent polity or an insubstantial, transient symbol of a chaotic and violent episode. Each assignat issued required a different design, although the formal variation to which the notes were subjected disguised certain features common to all. Roughly rectangular pieces of paper of varying dimensions and quality, assignats generally conformed to a basic scheme: a printed

Figure 4 Jean-Pierre Droz, assignat, twenty-five sols, 1792. Etching, engraving, and typography on paper. Private collection. Photo: author Figure 5 Billet de vingt sols, municipalité de Laval, département de la Mayenne, 1791. Etching on paper. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1988.227. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/ Domaine de Vizille

made of money | 15

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Figure 6 Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux, assignat (illuminated from beneath to show “La Nation” watermark), fifteen sous, 1792. Etching, engraving, and typography on watermarked paper. Private collection. Photo: author

frame or border enclosing a blank space in which were arranged a fluctuating series of signs indicating value and legitimacy. At various times these signs included either one or two royal portraits; a signature, either manuscript or printed; a mechanically generated number; a date of issue in either the Gregorian or the Republican calendar, sometimes both; a watermark; a “dry” or embossed inkless stamp (timbre sec); an “identical” stamp (timbre identique), reproduced in the same place on the verso side; diverse Republican insignia; and the ever-present warning “the law punishes the counterfeiter with death/the nation rewards the informer.”14 The aesthetic of the border of the assignat ran from a pared-down classicism to a more overtly decorative effect. This frame provided a structure for further signs, from fleurs-de-lys to fasces, Henri IV to Hercules.15 Furthermore, every assignat acted as a repository of printing techniques, combining a variety of approaches from standard copper engraving to more subtle means of identifying a note’s genuineness, many of which (watermarks and dry

stamps in particular) worked directly on and within the body of the assignat (fig. 6). While there was resistance to the use of assignats—cases such as that of the priest Pierre Bal, imprisoned for six months in 1794 and fined three thousand livres for refusing to accept assignats as payment, were not uncommon—the visual characteristics of the assignats were subject to regular inspection by enormous numbers of French people.16 For Edmund Burke, the forced use of assignats was intimately linked to the material facture of the paper notes, for “even the clergy are to receive their miserable allowance out of the depreciated paper, which is stamped with the indelible character of sacrilege, and with the symbols of their own ruin.”17 The assignat was, first and foremost, a representation: of metal currency, of “reclaimed” church and aristocratic land, but also of the radical political transformation on which the mutation of land into paper sign was based. The initial sale of land had conflated economic necessity and symbolic gesture to allow any

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citizen the right to circulate a piece of their regenerated nation in paper form, and from the outset the cultural and political potential of paper money was recognized alongside its economic value. Later projects to transform the church bells of France into coins that could be used in exchange for small denomination assignats rearticulated this symbolic appropriation in the guise of financial compulsion.18 Despite the diversity in its official production and the instability engendered by its illegal reproduction, the assignat was, I suggest, the ground against which most other forms of representation and their respective claims to authenticity were judged for much of the 1790s. In spite of prohibitions against their representation, assignats also found their way into a wide variety of images, both “revolutionary” and “counterrevolutionary” in intent and of diverse genre and media, from history paintings to printed caricatures. In its various guises as both subject and object of representation, the assignat—“the major emblem of the Revolution,” in the words of one historian—was subjected to an intense, politically motivated gaze, which, through its mobilization of bodily metaphor and by virtue of its position at the heart of contemporary debates about political legitimacy, played an important role in the construction of both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary ideologies.19 Furthermore, a range of more subtle motivations existed between these reductive binaries of revolutionary engagement, articulated via the conditions of the assignat’s production and use, as well as in its subsequent representation. The visuality of the assignat and its crucial currency in the Revolution traverse the relationship between its own status as an image and its function as a component of other images. Rarely assessed by art historians, and then typically in terms of either the artistic value of stamps engraved by the likes of Dupré, Tardieu, or Gatteaux or in relation to the technical complexities of their production alone, the material and visual qualities of printed paper notes have

been subordinated to their economic role.20 However, in order to consider fully the extent to which the assignat was bound up with the struggle for the Revolution’s survival, it is necessary to take its materiality seriously, as producing certain ways of thinking about the Revolution’s transformation of time, as participating in a social relationship with revolutionary subjects, and as engaging in a critical conversation with conventional forms of artistic representation.21

The Currency of Counterrevolution In revolutionary France the breakdown of traditional systems of patronage and display and the incentive to produce art that referenced an ever-changing political scene meant that the production of established genres for the exhibition of state power—history painting, monuments, and architecture in particular—was difficult and often altogether impossible. Print culture, on the other hand, flourished, although it was not, in its self-consciously “artistic” forms, systematically exploited by revolutionary legislators, for they were largely suspicious of the dissembling potential of signs. These prints—particularly satirical etchings and engravings—­ provided one of the key sites where the image of the assignat was mediated and often undermined. Caricatures, whose swiftness of production and concentration on the grotesque debasement of the body could not be easily reconciled with the idealizing rhetoric of Republican culture, were not employed as state-sponsored propaganda until 1794, although print entrepreneurs and groups with more explicit political affiliations had circulated them unofficially in large quantities since 1789. Caricature proliferated during the Revolution, but its spread was uneven and the ease with which it could be produced and sold varied according to the political regime in power.22 This burgeoning market in caricatures regularly worked against the Revolution, in the form of royalist prints that were made of money | 17

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overtly antithetical to its aims. The production of these caricatures, which were mostly anonymous, flourished for a short period in the ten months prior to the fall of the monarchy in August 1792, although counterrevolutionaries as well as revolutionaries had been slow to exploit the propagandistic potential of caricature. Adopting as their main themes the financial situation, the revolutionary attack on the clergy, and the preparations for impending war, these royalist prints took advantage of caricature’s ability to demean its subjects, exposing the rational and noble ambitions of the Revolution as absurdly flawed. The extent to which assignats infiltrated the caricatural repertoire is made arrestingly apparent in an anonymous German etching of 1793 (fig. 7). This print directly appropriates the “French” half of James Gillray’s 1792 anti-revolutionary contrast print French Liberty, British Slavery, representing a starving sans-culotte eulogizing his “land of milk and honey,” and juxtaposes it with a hallucinatory image of an oversized five livres assignat, a paper obsidional note issued during the siege of Mayence, and a trail of metal coins. An image of the French produced for a German audience via the work of a British artist, this work speaks to the confluence of caricature and paper money across international borders, and it unequivocally locates the assignat as central to discourses of consumption, dearth, and bodily decrepitude in revolutionary France. From the beginning of the Revolution, the assignat was one of the favorite topics of counterrevolutionary caricature. Using the perceived transience and potential falsity of the assignat to mock the instability of revolutionary politics and the venality of the Revolution’s principal figures, these single-sheet prints called into question the credibility of revolutionary claims to political, financial, and material value and posited paper money as dangerous to the health of the nation. However, a closer examination of these prints shows that caricature and assignat were not simply antithetical images, with carica-

ture, an art form centered on the image in transition, merely destabilizing the official image of the revolutionary state put forward by the assignat. Rather, these works demonstrated how the relationship between caricature and its subjects was precarious and variable, and that nonofficial imagery of this kind was engaged in a dialogue with its official counterparts that put the meaning of both under pressure. Most obviously, the bond between counterrevolutionary caricature and the assignat was made more ambiguous by the fact that until 1792 the assignat functioned as a form of miniature portrait, featuring at its center a prominent profile of Louis XVI. Between 1790 and 1795 Louis’s effigy appeared on twenty-three of the fifty-two assignats issued, often supplemented by miniature representations of the great French kings—Henri IV, Saint Louis—from whom his inherited power derived.23 Until the foundation of the Republic and the subsequent removal of the king’s head in both reality and representation, the king’s body-as-print remained the most explicit signifier of authenticity available to the assignat, even though it was often derived from prerevolutionary representations of royal power. Counterrevolutionary caricature, which represented these notes, was paradoxically defined by its closeness to, not difference from, official portraiture as mediated by revolutionary image-makers. Complicating the counterrevolutionary response to revolutionary signs, as the Revolution progressed the portrait of the king posed a threat to the political and material legitimacy of the assignat. As elsewhere, revolutionaries were forced to ask what new sign or signs could replace the symbolic and emotional currency of the king’s image. These debates were particularly pressing in the case of the assignat, where the value of money was inseparable from the royal profile, which recalled older and more secure units of exchange. We might read the uncertainty around this issue as a fulfillment of Burke’s prophecy that the assignat would never

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Figure 7 O Sacre Dieu—uns bekomm bien die Liberte-Welch ein Wollöben! Es fleust der Milk und die Hönick! Ah ça ira!, ca. 1793. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

be able to confront the signifying power of metal coinage on its own terms.24 Yet the decline of the coin, whose iconography was a traditional site for the material expression of absolute sovereignty, also spoke to the demise of royal authority, symbolically rendered paper-thin. The inkless imprint (timbre sec) and watermark may not have had the symbolic weight of metal coinage; however, they furnished the assignat with an unprecedented and specifically revolutionary political agency. This came at a potential cost to the financial authority of paper currency—yet paradoxically, from late 1792, by purposefully reducing royal involvement on the surface of the assignat to a diaphanous afterimage, royal participation in the national

body could be shown to be as ephemeral as the technological guarantee of the assignat. Accordingly, the visual arrangement of the assignat became an increasingly dialectical site for the mediation of revolutionary or Ancien-Régime politics. A twenty-five sols note from 1792 (see fig. 4) demonstrates this ambivalent conflation of symbols at a crucial point of departure. Topped by an eye of surveillance from which a scrolled anticounterfeiting warning unfurls, this assignat features two circular blanks printed to accommodate stamps. The imprint on the righthand side features a representation of a beehive, inscribed “Republique Française, 21 septembre 1792,” the date of the made of money | 19

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Figure 8 Bon de cinquante livres; Dieu et le Roi, 1793. Etching, engraving, and typography in green ink on paper. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 9 Assignat of five francs folded in the manner of the Vendéens and the Chouans to read “la mort de la République,” ca. 1794. Folded assignat mounted on paper. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

proclamation of the Republic. In the center a gallic cockerel, symbolizing vigilance, raises a banner marked “la liberté ou la mort.” In every sense this note appears to bear testimony to the allegorical schema of the Republic. However, a closer look reveals inconsistencies. Each corner of the minimally patterned border features a royalist fleur-de-lys, while the stamp on the left-hand side retains the royal imprint. Although the issue of this note was announced by a law of 4 January 1792, it was in fact released on 21 September, but it was not able to accommodate fully the momentous changes that occurred that day. Stuck between two no longer compatible regimes, this compound, dialogic iconography represents a moment of crisis before the reimposition of order, a political struggle for control of the image fought on the surface of the national currency. Perhaps inevitably, in 1793 and 1794 the forces of the Royal and Catholic Army fighting Republican troops in the bloody wars of the Vendée appropriated the form of the assignat as a symbol of counterrevolutionary resistance. Diverse bons in the name of the king were issued, while notes featuring the profile of the dauphin Louis-Charles (that most provisional of royal figures) alongside prominent fleurs-de-lys were circulated in expectation of eventual victory (fig. 8).25 Rejecting the anticlericalism of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the forced conscription of the levée en masse in

February 1793, the Vendéen royalists asserted the legitimacy of Bourbon rule by inserting an image of “Louis XVII” at the center of a received sign of value. The use of a paper note to disseminate this image demonstrates the ubiquity and versatility of the assignat as a focus of either political integrity or opprobrium; even though the connotative association between the assignat and the Revolution was very strong, the perception of its mutability clearly encouraged experimentation with its form. When a town was captured by the counterrevolutionary armies, its bank and the supply of assignats it contained were destroyed and replaced with their royalist equivalents. The impact of this act of defiance was amplified by basing the value of the notes on that of Republican assignats, thereby reclaiming, symbolically, the value of the land taken by the Revolution, even as the existence of true assignats “à face royale” was tacitly approved by this maneuver. On 15 brumaire year II (5 November 1793), the Convention decreed that distributors of these royalist “assignats” should be subject to the same stringent penalties as producers of counterfeits. Yet little could be done when the image in question was in fact a genuine piece of currency: in 1794 both Vendéen royalists and Chouan rebels in Brittany and Maine are reported to have used cleverly folded assignats as a means of identifying themselves to one

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another (fig. 9). As one remarkable image shows, a neat piece of origami on a five livres assignat quickly turned the Republican slogan of “liberté, egalité, fraternité ou la mort” against itself—“la mort de la République” reads the message hidden in plain sight at the center of this intelligently improvised identity card.

The Body of Caricature Such manipulations of the assignat would likely not have been so immediately meaningful nor so effective were the transgressive possibilities of paper money not already established in the counterrevolutionary satire of the early 1790s. One print, an anonymous caricature known as L’homme aux assignats (fig. 10),

made of money | 21

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Figure 10 L’homme aux assignats, 1791. Engraving and aquatint. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Photo: Library of Congress

offered an early response to the revolutionary assault on the royal body politic. Encapsulating the malleability of the assignat at this point, it provides a particularly useful case study with which to evaluate the success of the caricatural denigration of revolutionary paper money and to examine the competing claims to truthfulness of both assignat and caricature, for both money and satire promised an undisguised, transparent authenticity, even if distortion, artifice, or fraud always hovered close by.

Issued in November 1791 by the counterrevolutionary publisher Michel Wébert, L’homme aux assignats ridicules the institutional abuse of a newly issued five livres assignat and condemns the management of French finances since 1789.26 This print was very successful and it served as a model for many subsequent caricatures. The influence of its image of a corrupt paper body could still be discerned six years later, in an anonymous French etching, La Bourse protège les agioteurs

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Figure 11 La Bourse protège les agioteurs, ca. 1797. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

(fig. 11), in which a female “Bourse” (stock exchange) clad in a voluminous skirt of mandats territoriaux protects a group of devious speculators. Claude Langlois has described how the publication of L’homme aux assignats was a unique development in counterrevolutionary caricature, marking a shift from book-based to single-sheet publication.27 This transition was significant, as it defined the point at which counterrevolutionary caricature could be said to have achieved a new autonomy as a valuable form of political critique. The scene is set in the Archives Nationales, where the formes and matrices used to make assignats were stored in conditions of maximum security. By locating the image in the Archives, the anonymous author of L’homme aux assignats invoked the technical production of the assignat as a sign of its opacity and secret manipulation, rather than the politically inflected transparency claimed by revolutionaries. What is more, they devalued the Revolution’s official memory by

suggesting that the archival documents that comprised its political legacy were as ephemeral as paper money.28 At the center of the image is the improbable figure of Armand Gaston Camus, the first director of the Archives, who was ridiculed habitually in the counterrevolutionary press for his role in the first release of assignats, for his contribution to drafting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and for his proposals for the reduction of the civil list.29 Grandly emerging from a crowd of revolutionary malefactors, Camus engages the viewer with a solemn gaze that makes his sartorial eccentricity appear all the more absurd.30 As the counterrevolutionary journalist Boyer de Nîmes observed, Camus’s grave, self-satisfied demeanor is rendered hilarious by its radical contrast with his clothing, for in this caricature, Camus’s dress, including his hair, is composed of assignats of various denominations.31 The revolutionary figures surrounding him are attempting, with little resistance, to relieve him of his paper suit. Barnave is made of money | 23

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receiving a large sum of money to cover gambling debts. The bespectacled Le Chapelier—whose own costume and attributes reference biribi, a popular but highly speculative game of risk he was incorrectly credited with having invented— sneaks a note from Camus’s coat, as does Brissot, on bended knee.32 In the background, Charles Lameth, Abbé Fauchet, Dom Mulot, Chabot, and Pastoret scrap for fragments of the archivist’s fragile garments, which are disintegrating rapidly to reveal an undetermined surface. To paraphrase Marx, “circulation,” in this case of a transgressive nature, “sweats money from every pore.”33 Yet while the bodies of the characters in L’homme aux assignats allow for a wide range of comic possibilities, the facial features of the revolutionaries represented in this print are not exaggerated or distorted as one might expect. Unlike the grotesque, dissimulative, and absurd aristocrats and priests of revolutionary caricature, these figures are all recognizable, their features appropriated in some cases from known portraits.34 Counterrevolutionary caricature, as Langlois has suggested, “played the card of the immediate present,” unlike revolutionary prints, which relied on a contrast between a rejected past and a revolutionary future, disregarding for the most part a present populated by contemporary political figures.35 In this ironic paraphrasing of the corporeal duality of royalty, Camus is cast as a paper monarch, insubstantial and lacking in real authority. His disrobing mimics the staged publicness of the royal déshabiller, thrown into sharp relief by the tattered garments of the elderly royal soldier of the order of Saint-Louis, entering on the left-hand side of the scene. This bedraggled character, who has arrived to appeal against the withdrawal of his pension, is rebuffed by Camus and denied access to the wealth the archivist wears about his person; “dine with your friends” reads the piece of paper he is passed. The print brings to mind a range of artistic associations, from seventeenth-century royal portraiture to the

écorché. However, the most explicit reference is to John Law. This is indicated by Camus’s anachronistic dress and hairstyle, while his portrait as a whole is adapted from Leonard and Pieter Schenck’s portrait of Law, published shortly before the implosion of his scheme in 1720 (fig. 12). The “immediate present” of counterrevolutionary caricature was clearly not inconsistent with a pronounced historical awareness. The staging of Camus in relation to this portrait of Law in L’homme aux assignats implies that he is similarly positioned in anticipation of an impending economic meltdown. It further exposes the sophisticated ways in which conventional portraiture was made to intersect with the practice of caricature during this period. Camus appeared frequently in such prints, as a combination of anticlericalism, assignats, and comic effect concentrated counterrevolutionary vitriol around him. The caricatural onslaught against Camus in 1791 does not seem to have been directed with the same intensity at other legislators involved in the issue of assignats. These condemnations did not cease after 1791 but actually increased in intensity after the withdrawal of the assignat five years later. In the anonymous Camus et un acolyte accueillent un couple de rentiers of 1797 (fig. 13), the bizarrely gnome-like figure of the archivist, seated astride repossessed furniture and clutching a handful of assignats, is posited as responsible for the assignat’s depreciation and the rentiers’ ruin, his companion sporting oversized clothes reclaimed from one such impoverished figure. Camus is referred to by name again in L’impayable rentier de l’état, que ne suis-je Camus (fig. 14), an indictment quite out of proportion to his role in either the original issue of assignats or their subsequent collapse.36 The figure in this print, stroking his long nose, lets us in on a joke at Camus’s expense: his name, in French, meaning “snub-nosed.” The repeated deployment of this motif may imply that Camus suffers from a lack of “sense.” 37 However, it is probable that it also condenses a

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Figure 12 Leonard Schenck and Pieter Schenck II, Mr Jean Law, 1720. Etching. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum

number of sexual and anti-Semitic inferences.38 Elsewhere, the paper body is displaced onto a newspaper-clad figure representing the press in Les braves brigands d’Avignon, another print by the anonymous artist responsible for L’homme aux assignats, in which Camus is situated at the center of an ultraviolent scene of revolutionary cannibalism. Identified by the inscription “Archives Nationales” across his chest, Camus is again the butt of jokes about his short or nonexistent nose, which in true carnivalesque fashion substitutes the lower bodily stratum for the reasoning head, metonymically rendering his nose a penis, albeit a small one. In this print referencing the massacres of 16 October, the legislator is depicted as an accomplice to anthropophagous revolutionaries who are seen devouring the dismembered limbs of their enemies. It may be that the breach of Camus’s flimsy armature in the earlier L’homme aux assignats had prepared the ground for a conceptual alignment with other more explicit forms of dismemberment.39 In fact, although Camus’s clothes in L’homme aux assignats are clearly composed of assignats, we are encouraged to believe that this extends to his body as a whole, for clothing is figured as a bodily fragment. It is at the margins of Camus’s body that this illusion is both maintained and uncovered, for while a furled assignat around each wrist prevents the viewer from clearly making out the edge of a sleeve, the exposed breeches, shoes, and necktie are more clearly delineated. Partly integrated with the money and partly a frame for the paper notes whose ownership is being disputed, Camus’s corporeal autonomy is reliant on the unlikely restraint of his revolutionary colleagues. This is a body in flux. Like the assignats that ornament him in this image, Camus, the revolutionary legislation for which he stands, and the revolutionary memory that his archives materialize are shown to be unfixed and transformable, a frangible surface becoming transparent and insecure before our eyes. Even the writing that covers L’homme made of money | 25

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Figure 13 Camus et un acolyte accueillent un couple de rentiers, ca. 1797. Etching and aquatint. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 14 L’impayable rentier de l’état, que ne suis-je Camus, ca. 1797. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 15 Ouf!, 1794. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

aux assignats cannot stabilize the image, marking its various parts as discursive surfaces on which the partisan political associations of the revolutionary period might be mapped and read. Alongside the assignats, a multitude of other scraps of paper and fragments of text, from a key identifying the characters to the archives in the background, combine to create a complex scene of interpretation for viewers of this print, pushing it in the direction of a rebus or allegory.40 The rest of the image is equally cryptic and open-ended. Behind the files of matrices and departmental correspondence on the left-hand side of the image, a figure is shown burning handfuls of assignats—an uncanny premonition of their eventual fate. The walls of the chamber are decorated with wallpaper whose central motif is an indistinct allegorical pairing of figures, one bearing a cornucopia of assignats, the other clutching a two-faced jester’s mask. The representation of Camus in this print calls to mind the Cris de Paris genre of popular imagery featuring workers clad in the tools or products of their trade, a form returned to some years later to satirize the penury caused by the assignat’s depreciation (fig.

15).41 However, L’homme aux assignats does not present an image of a static, “natural” order of traditional labor, but rather it configures the assignat as an aberrant, fluctuating, and makeshift terrain on which diverse political identities might be formed. In a visual language that allies the corporeal to the political, the assignat is invoked as an image of political conflict, undermining attempts to secure its value and challenging the claims to fiscal and symbolic stability made in revolutionary images.

Reproducing the Revolutionary Assignat The most explicit alignment of the assignat with revolutionary politics and its best-known artistic representation is undoubtedly its presence at the center of Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 Marat assassiné, where a painted note, the sharp Didot typeface of the “A” clearly visible, sits atop the martyred Marat’s last piece of writing, a letter to a virtuous mother in need (fig. 16). Certainly, the context for this image’s production in the summer of 1793 was radically different from that

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made of money | 27

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Figure 16 Jacques-Louis David, Marat assassiné, 1793. Oil on canvas. Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Photo © Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels/J. Geleyns/www.roscan.be

which conditioned the making of L’homme aux assignats in 1791, although the two images are far from unrelated. They share a concern with the conditions of political legitimacy and material and bodily authenticity, and in both images the assignat is crucial to this consideration, the axis around which the greater part of each work revolves. What is more, considered together these images have something to tell us about the complex and unresolved relationship between portraiture, caricature, and paper money in 1790s France. In David’s painting the single, folded assignat is squarely located as an attribute of Marat and the radical Jacobinism for which he stood. The assignat represented Marat’s final act, the gift of hard-won money, and thus communicated his own unparalleled, self-advertised political integrity, his self-identification as the friend of the people.42 The physical proximity of Marat’s letter to the note reinforces this allegiance, while conversely his left hand, as a dying gesture, raises the traitorous letter with which Corday had gained access to Marat’s apartment away from it. Marat’s enthusiastic exposure of counterrevolutionaries, his demands for political and moral transparency, his loathing of counterfeiting or dissimulation in all areas of public and private life, and his claims for authenticity all seem to be bound up in this fragile little scrap of paper. For T. J. Clark, this assignat, which is meant to be overlooked “but only in the way of Poe’s Hidden Letter,” is central to the painting’s message.43 The lightweight paper assignat, in Clark’s insightful reading, carries a “freight of meaning” and stands for the contingency of revolutionary politics made material, representing the dangerous arbitrariness of the sign as well as the concrete virtue of poverty with which David hoped to credit Marat. Both Marat assassiné and L’homme aux assignats focus on the represented body as a site of, respectively, immortality or disintegration, betraying a very real fear in both images that the opposite might be the case. The precariousness of the body as a

sign of political value was reflected and given an expressive language by the material instability of the assignat, the ultimate sign of both value and worthlessness. As has been noted, even in their completed form assignats were subject to piecemeal modification and adaptation. Yet this volatility plagued their production, too, as the demand for assignats became so great that the paper used to make them was often transported and printed before it had time enough to dry, rendering the notes delicate and subject to blemishes.44 Unease about this situation, coupled no doubt with hopes of commercial success, inspired one proposal that assignats be printed on card.45 The anonymous author of this pamphlet suggested that the card made by Mme Delagarde, an associate of the famous wallpaper manufacturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, would be especially appropriate.46 This citizen’s anxiety about the materiality of the national currency, his desire that it should be “by all necessity, a representative of money, that resists rubbing and mutation,” expressed a fear shared by numerous revolutionary commentators.47 In comparison to defective paper, the imperviousness of the “strong, supple” cardboard imparted an enchanted status, aligning it with permanent metal coinage. “Moreover,” the pamphleteer added, Mme Delagarde’s card “blackens in fire rather than burning, and I have seen proof of this.”48 As a counterrevolutionary print from 1792 featuring a coin descending from the clouds above an awed and appreciative audience suggests (fig. 17), the indestructibility of the coined royal profile rendered it sacred, for this image represents the magical return of metal coinage as equivalent to a divinely ordained revival of monarchy. Although his political sympathies were quite different, the pamphleteer’s claim to have seen the failed burning of the new assignat with his own eyes marks an attempt to claim similar magical properties for the assignat, close scrutiny of the note playing, as always, an important role in its profession of truth. These concerns were exploited nine months after the publication of this pamphlet

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made of money | 29

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Figure 17 Adoration des patriotes, à l’aspect d’un gros-sous, dessinée en France d’après nature l’an (sans argent) 3 de la liberté, 1792. Aquatint. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1990.46.24. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/Domaine de Vizille

by the artist responsible for L’homme aux assignats and by David in Marat assassiné. While the former alleged that the material frailty of the assignat, its translucency and vulnerability to wear and tear were irrevocably bound to an economic and political collapse, the latter represented the assignat as an inviolable sign of political virtue. Isolated as a unique, sacred relic rather than as a mass of worthless paper, the surviving assignat is the double of Marat himself, for via this image both are shown to have in some way survived the death of the body. David’s use of Marat’s assignat to connote the journalist’s political and moral authenticity was nevertheless inseparable from the lack of authenticity that plagued the assignat at the time of the image’s production. Many artists, David included, were involved with the design of the assignat,

encouraged by a competition launched in July 1793 to find a way to “perfect the assignats” as a preventative measure against counterfeiting.49 The persistent trace of the assignat in the context of David’s painting was a rebuttal of the damage that counterfeiting—and, we might add, counterrevolutionary caricature—were doing. By linking the assignat to Marat, David bolstered the assignat’s revolutionary credentials, which in turn confirmed Marat’s legitimacy and conveniently promoted David’s own political status and artistic practice. Painting and paper collaborated to achieve the same ends, united in their resistance to L’homme aux assignats’s denigration of both assignats and revolutionary portraits. In actual fact, David’s painting is a rare example of an assignat appearing in a revolutionary image of any medium. By virtue of the proscription against counterfeiting, artists

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whose political credentials were less secure than David’s steered clear of directly representing the notes, a scruple obviously not shared by counterrevolutionary image-makers, who inevitably operated on the fringes of the law. Printmakers in particular had to tread carefully, as they especially risked accusations of counterfeiting. Teacher Pierre Vivé’s defense in early 1796 of a young deaf-mute man accused of imitating, during the harsh winter of 1795, five and ten livres notes to the value of forty-five livres, in pencil and pen, is instructive in this regard.50 The culprit, Louis Baudonnet, was apprehended in a cake shop trying to spend his counterfeits, which were crudely made. Vivé argued that as Baudonnet’s notes were drawings, rather than prints, they could not be considered counterfeits, and he was eventually acquitted due to his lack of intention to defraud. The case hinged on Baudonnet’s supposed misunderstanding of the phrase “the law punishes the counterfeiter with death,” which he had painstakingly copied onto each note, signing, like all counterfeiters, an admission of guilt and potential death sentence.51 There were, however, some exceptions to the revolutionary interdiction against the reproduction of the assignat, such as a print representing the disguised Louis XVI being recognized against his portrait on an assignat (fig. 18), foiling his 1791 attempt to flee Paris for Varennes. A reduced scale seems to have justified this more schematic representation.52 Alongside the degrading sexual undertones of masturbation figured in the phallic pig’s foot clasped by the king, the image is, as Rebecca Spang has observed, a scene in which the king is called to account. For while the postmaster Drouet appears to be presenting Louis with his bill, it in fact bears no sum but his head, the actual price he must pay for his crimes.53 This ghoulish politico-economic analogy resonates with the popular print motif, sometimes (incorrectly) attributed to Philibert-Louis Debucourt, of a “patriotic calculator” totting up the number of severed heads.54

The joke in this print is that the bloated and complacent Louis was dissimilar in appearance to the noble, classically inflected countenance depicted in profile on the note, although of course, in fact, as Desmoulins reported, “the delay in preparing them [the pigs’ feet] and the too close likeness of his face on an assignat were fatal to him. The postmaster who had seen the painting thought he recognized the model.”55 Similarity, rather than difference, was the primary means of the king’s undoing. What is more, as Desmoulins realized, the juxtaposition of assignat and king was triangulated with the memory of earlier encounters with Louis’s painted portrait. Consequently, as with L’homme aux assignats, the force of this caricature is not derived from excessive exaggeration or distortion of the king’s facial features but rather from his humiliating situation and the appearance of his body from the neck down. Both caricature, which ultimately depends for its success on viewers’ ability to identify its subjects, and the assignat, for which recognition of authenticity was crucial, function here as media of verification. As this caricature of Louis amply demonstrates, not only was close examination central to the credibility of assignats, but the notes themselves also bore the vestiges of an authenticating potential inherited from metal coinage. The institutional dissimulation for which the king stood accused was contrasted in this print with the virtuous transparency of the assignat. However, by ridiculing the king and exposing his inability to live up to the ideal standard figured on the note, the comparison between the king and his portrait inadvertently called attention to the instability of the assignat and its failure to communicate a solitary, truthful meaning, unlike the mutual authentication evinced by David’s portrait of Marat. Juxtaposing “authentic” and “inauthentic” representations of political power, the print fails to resolve fully the question of which, if either, is the “true” image. The barely repressed implication here is that both king and assignat, might, in fact, be counterfeits. made of money | 31

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Figure 18 Le roi mangeant des pieds à la Sainte Menehould, le maitre du poste confronte un assignat et reconnait le roi, from Révolutions de France et de Brabant, no. 81, 1791. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Fabrications Without a doubt, counterfeiting presented the most sustained threat to the value and stability of paper currency. By increasing the number of notes in circulation, counterfeit production devalued the official currency, undermining confidence in its ability to represent and maintain a universal standard. Unfortunately those responsible for policing the assignat, the local police and the centralized bureaux of authentication and manufacture, often did not know where to look for illicit production. Common sense suggested that the majority of counterfeiters—whether unemployed journeymen or papermakers who had come by a stolen printing plate—were involved in the printing trade at some level. With this in mind, one commentator expressed incredulity at the thought that artists might become involved in such a despicable activity, remarking that “it is difficult to believe that a top-rate artist can at the same time be a counterfeiter and an assassin.”56 Interestingly, this only applied to artists “de premier ordre,” the implication being that lesser artists were probably well used to slavish copying and thus more likely to be involved in counterfeiting, for only producers of elite cultural products were exempt from the revolutionary suspicion of representation. Prosecutions for those accused of counterfeiting often attempted to identify the act of counterfeiting with other forms of dissimulation or simulation, whether in the context of the crime itself or in other areas of the accused’s life.57

In fact, as police records show, the situation was far more complex, for although those sentenced to death for counterfeiting were largely employed in artisanal occupations, the range was considerable, from clockmaker to soldier, rabbit-skin salesman to lawyer.58 In addition, the British government, supported by émigré leaders such as Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, was engaged in a sustained and extensive program of counterfeiting, flooding France with forgeries in an attempt to provoke economic ruin. In March 1792 the Chronique de Paris reported the seizure at Passy of thirteen million livres of counterfeit assignats, which indicated the scale of the problem, although there was confusion about which counterrevolutionary body was responsible.59 In London alone, more than seventeen counterfeiting establishments are rumored to have existed by 1795, allegedly employing some four hundred workers.60 This operation reached its peak around 1794, as counterfeit assignats arrived in vast quantities to aid the war in the Vendée.61 Lacking legal existence, émigrés occupied a provisional and frequently invisible position with regard to the Revolution they opposed, and by July 1792 their land and buildings had been commandeered by the Legislative Assembly.62 This unseen quality engendered a deep-seated paranoia about their movements and a popular surveillance that detected their hand in any suspicious or potentially counterrevolutionary activity. Counterfeit assignats forcibly asserted émigré agency in the made of money | 33

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Revolution, backed by a partisan émigré press that reversed revolutionary rhetoric to accuse France’s leaders of the corrupt use of devalued assignats for their own ends.63 Anxiety over the exchange of counterfeit notes was paralleled by institutional concern about the safe circulation of legitimate assignats. For instance, Lavigne, deputy of the department of Lot and Garonne, railed against the possible dangers involved in sending assignats by post. These hazards included the murder of couriers, theft, distribution of counterfeits, and false claims that money had been sent when it had not or that money had not been received when it had.64 To prevent these duplicitous acts, Lavigne suggested the introduction of a system proposed by Finiquel whereby citizens should present their assignats of five livres or more for verification the day before dispatch. The notes would be stamped and sealed within a special envelope that would receive further imprints at each town through which it passed. On arrival the recipient would receive, with the money, a printed pro forma document filled in with written details of the notes signed by both sender and verifier, which would act as a guarantee of transmission.65 This control of circulation mirrored the increasing surveillance of individual movement at the time, represented in printed form by the passport, whose stamps, signatures, and descriptions likewise accumulated at every town or checkpoint through which a bearer passed, demonstrating the ambivalence with which revolutionaries approached the circulation of both images and bodies. In a similar vein, counterfeit assignats—printed “ANNULÉ” or “FAUX” in capitalized text with a manuscript procès-verbal detailing the nature of the crime on the verso side—were archived after their discovery as a safeguard against similar imitations, entering the mushrooming apparatus of revolutionary bureaucracy as annotated criminal histories. Nonetheless, no image was secure, and even assignats certified as real were often revealed as fakes after a period of time.

The complex materiality of the assignat was a direct response to these conditions, and the visuality of assignats itself frequently operated at a hidden or fugitive level. Some notes, such as a two hundred livres note from April 1790, even utilized typographic “secrets”—in this case an extended left-hand upright to the “N” of “Nationale,” practically invisible to the naked eye—that counterfeiters might inadvertently correct, making, in effect, a copy truer than the original.66 Assignats were produced under conditions of utmost secrecy, their printers sworn to confidentiality and required to carry identity cards. Equally, counterfeiters were bound by a code of silence that resulted from their desire to prevent detection. Prison did not stop many counterfeiters, proving an ideal environment in which to acquire necessary contacts and knowledge; once captured, distributers of assignats printed abroad were accommodated alongside domestic criminals at Châtelet, la Conciergerie, la Force, l’Abbaye, and Bicêtre prisons.67 As often as not, counterfeiting operations were the outcome of imprisonment for very different crimes. Consequently, both official and nonofficial assignat production were based on a “closed shop” mentality that put a high premium on the discovery and examination of the others’ work. In effect, legal and illicit manufacturers were in competition against one another for the same market, despite their evident differences. Initial issues of assignats had been produced in a variety of printing workshops, as well as on Anisson-Duperron’s press at the Imprimerie Royale, later Nationale.68 In 1791 production was transferred to the former monastery of the PetitsAugustins on the Place Vendôme, a move that required the displacement of the collection of natural history housed there. As production increased in intensity, more and more parts of the monastery were appropriated to accommodate the presses. On 5 July 1792 the monastery of the Petits-Pères and that of the Grands-Augustins on the Place des Victoires were similarly claimed by the Revolution, following an appeal by Finance

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Minister Clavière to Roland, minister of the interior.69 Finally, on 7 September 1792, the Convent of the Capuchins was adapted for this purpose alongside the Petits-Augustins in the assignat-making center of the Place Vendôme.70 Although the convents and monasteries were appropriately large buildings with adequate security and ready-made spaces for the insertion of large-scale printing equipment, the practical requirements of fabrication were matched by an unmistakable symbolic significance. On 1 June 1790 the National Assembly had ordered the foundation of bureaux de vérification in every major town. However, this command was never fulfilled, and counterfeiting was not subjected to consistent institutional surveillance until June 1792, when a committee comprising De Surgy, Delaître, and De la Marche was charged with the examination of suspect notes, and the government centers for the fabrication of assignats, headed by De la Marche (whose death warrant David was later to sign), took overall control of the assignats’ authentication.71 The institution of a specific sub-body responsible for the systematic verification of assignats, led by Deperey, chief inspector of assignats, was not accomplished until quite late, on 4 January 1793, while offices for the authentication of assignats were not placed on national borders until 13 ventôse year II (3 March 1794)—a calamitous delay, considering the quantity of forged notes entering France from abroad.72 Determining the authenticity of an assignat required an intimate knowledge of each aspect of its construction and appearance. Assistance was available in the form of lists of characteristic marks, which supplied exhaustive detail on the many checks necessary to ensure proof of authenticity. Although Deperey was forced to admit that “it is impossible to give a statement of signs of falsehood for all the species of false assignats in circulation; the number of them would be too large,” he nevertheless proposed that the best method was to

compare each assignat with one known to be correct, whereby “one glance is enough to perceive the shapes and measure the spaces.”73 In a similar mode, a table produced by Deperey in 1794 comprised an extensive list of comparisons between real and false assignats, including their most recent procès-verbal description and their most prominent distinguishing features. This body of information made it possible to scrutinize counterfeit assignats as if they were themselves criminals.74 Always concluding “certified as complying with the original,” these printed anticounterfeiting documents were implicated in the same debates about political and material authenticity that structured the assignat, while in the wrong hands they could, ironically, prove an effective guide to the production of perfect forgeries. Despite his prioritization of the visual, Deperey urged his reader to seek the true assignat not in the image but in the text and the devices used to frame the image. Whereas images—the timbre sec and timbre identique—were susceptible to the “genius of the artist who designed them,” the same could not be said of “letters,” which, he claimed, articulated a far more objective, virtuous stance on reality.75 Deperey proposed that special attention be paid to letters that required particular skill to produce, such as S, s, R, r, E, e, A, and a, contributing, despite his suspicion of artistic agency, to a belief that the master printer alone could produce types in which perfection resided in “the purity, the regularity, the clarity of design.”76 Invoking the language of contemporary neoclassical architecture, whose association with the ideal and unmediated was elicited to the advantage of the assignat, Deperey praised “the purity and boldness that exists in the engraving of these letters,” approving their “����������������������������������������������������� caractère�������������������������������������������� ,” a term of commendation found in contemporary architectural treatises that linked formal to moral characteristics.77 This classical language of typeface is perhaps unsurprising in an era where so much projected architecture never made it beyond the page. With architecture as text and made of money | 35

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text as architecture, a rhetoric of solidity and authenticity was established that confirmed printed text as a signifier of structural and monetary legitimacy. Deperey’s suggested technique exemplifies how the legitimacy of an assignat depended, for both individuals and the state, on its visual reception, and he concluded his report by proposing that “verifying machines” be installed in public banks.78 These machines—which were, it seems, never produced on any great scale—consisted of frames laid over the suspect notes, on which several features were marked for correspondence, or a system of reflecting mirrors that allowed comparison between a suspect note and an authenticated original.79 Contrary to Deperey’s strategy of juxtaposition, the scientist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier suggested an alternative to the fetishization of similitude as the sole guarantee of authenticity. Lavoisier argued that counterfeiting would be made more difficult by the adoption of more areas of difference, as the more complex the technical attributes of a particular note, the more expensive it would prove to counterfeit.80 In practice, a combination of techniques exploiting both similarity and difference were employed, sometimes at the same time, on the same note. In 1802 Camus himself weighed in on these debates, in his Histoire et procédés du polytypage et de la stéréotypie, an account of the development of stereotype printing. Camus acclaimed the technological advances made in the production of assignats, yet he noted how a cursory examination of counterfeits and counterfeiting procedures had shown how “the first counterfeiter of assignats was the Government itself, since aside from the first plate used, all the others were but more or less faithful imitations and copies.”81 Camus’s discovery of institutionalized counterfeiting was not an accusation of criminal goings-on in government office. Rather, he was referring to the inability of the printmaking process to deal with the vast quantity of assignats requiring printing. This technological misstep resulted in an unfortunate lack of

distinction between official and nonofficial notes and severely hampered the detection of counterfeits. When Augustin de Saint-Aubin was asked to engrave the king’s profile for the first issue of assignats, it became clear that a single copper plate could not withstand millions of impressions. Moreover, even if the plate did survive, the process would be so time-consuming as to be prohibitive. Saint-Aubin engraved as many as three hundred plates of the king’s head, each one, despite the artist’s best efforts, deviating slightly from the first engraved.82 As a result, the very insignia chosen to indicate authenticity, the king’s head, functioned as a destabilizing presence on the note. In this context, how were revolutionary image-makers and law-givers supposed to distinguish true from false? Where, in Saint-Aubin’s multiple “states,” was an original able to withstand scrutiny as a paradigm of authenticity, with all the attendant cultural and economic ramifications that implied? The problem posed by Saint-Aubin’s deviations from the original was eventually resolved by the introduction of stereotyping after 1 February 1793. For the first few years of their production, assignats had been made by bringing together a set of diverse elements, the engravings, types, and borders, within a metal frame known as a forme (or “skeleton” in printer’s slang), from which an image was printed. Completed formes of the same note were variable and had a limited lifespan, while the components were liable to move slightly within the forme during the printing process. This labor-intensive procedure also limited the quantity of assignats that could be produced, as each sheet of paper would have to be printed several times from the same forme. Stereotyping, which involved printing from a cast forme, was a means by which each assignat could be made to resemble exactly another of the same type. In this method, strips of copper, or matrices, featuring the engravings were as usual attached to the forme, which also held the typefaces. This was then stamped, with a specially constructed striking machine, into a viscous,

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recooling mixture of lead, antimony, and tin, which yielded the fragmented elements of the composition, the type, line, and ornament, as a single plate, or cliché.83 Rather than each artist having to make a large quantity of duplicate plates, a single plate could by this method be reproduced in large numbers, ensuring perfect similitude between assignats. Furthermore, unlike conventional intaglio procedures, with the stereotype method formes could be composed in a visually “correct” manner, allowing greater speed and ease of production.84 The engraver Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux recognized the revolutionary impact that stereotyping had on assignat production, for whereas in the past “one tried to engrave an assignat from only one piece, as a means to ensure perfect resemblance,” its introduction rendered such technical virtuosity unnecessary.85 The commencement of stereotyping in the government workshops followed just ten days after the execution of Louis XVI, whose fluctuating profile on the assignat had blurred the boundary between original and copy, undermining revolutionary representation from within.

Sickness and Speculation All of these debates about the truth-telling function of paper money were crucial to and prefigured in counterrevolutionary caricature. Prints such as L’homme aux assignats purported to expose a secret revolutionary space and to reveal the greedy and self-serving attitudes of a revolutionary elite, expanding to the level of political allegory the accusations of flimsiness and artificiality that beset the assignat. However, despite its revelatory claims, caricature was, like the assignat itself, a form of representation that occupied an uncertain middle ground between authenticity and falsehood, playing with categories of similarity and difference. By appropriating other areas of the visual, caricature, despite its political partisanship, left open a space for interpretation that meant the new realities it

suggested remained always shot through with ambiguity. Furthermore, as these images demonstrate, caricature was particularly well situated to address the fractured relationship between normative, coherent, “original” bodies and their deformed, deceptive, or unhealthy imitations. In his plea that “it is urgent to reestablish circulation, whose languor is a grave sickness for the whole body politic,” Anne-Pierre Montesquiou was not alone in locating assignat use at the center of discourses surrounding the health of the nation.86 This is unsurprising perhaps, for as the deputy Lanthenas observed, “in the organization of a true Republic, everything is linked, each part is related to the others, as in the admirable organization of animate bodies.”87 The threat posed by counterfeiting was imagined via a metaphor of contagion that counteracted the “purity” required of official notes, and Deperey found ready support for his characterization of false assignats as “infectious.”88 Only close examination of the paper body of the assignat could prevent this illness, and the transparent skin of the assignat was repeatedly and anxiously looked “through,” much as Deperey suggested it should be. As another anonymous image issued by Wébert demonstrates (fig. 19), this corporeal language was shared by those opposed to the Revolution and was associated in particular with the diseased female body. At the center of this print, a woman representing the Constitution is expiring, appropriately enough from consumption, on a bed of assignats. The journalist Linotte, writing about this print in the counterrevolutionary newspaper Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, imagined the Constitution as already dead, bound in a funeral shroud constructed from “pieces of paper, colored, effigied, and marked with a dry stamp.”89 Tuberculosis, as Susan Sontag observed, “makes the body transparent,” and in this print the body of the Constitution and the assignats that support her are subjected to a clinical scrutiny that parodies the revolutionary obsession with political transparency.90 made of money | 37

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Figure 19 L’expirante Targinette, 1792. Aquatint. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1988.152. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/ Domaine de Vizille Figure 20 Cas des assignats, chez l’étranger, 1792. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Gui-Jean-Baptiste Target, a lawyer and Parisian deputy who had played an important role in the development of the Constitution, is depicted as the “father” of this figure. He stands at the bedhead, dabbing his eyes and mourning the imminent demise of his daughter, “Targinette.” Related images of an obese Target giving birth to the Constitution had already been widely circulated in royalist circles, while conversely, a number of revolutionary prints featured a dying aristocratic body attended by members of the nobility.91 Meanwhile,

Camus, taking her pulse—monitoring, in other words, her circulation—desperately administers restorative “bouillons de clergé,” made from the concentrated blood of the priest that the Abbé Fauchet is busy dispatching to the left-hand side of the image. Again, the iconoclastic erasure of Camus’s nose rearticulates the satirical punning on his name. In the foreground, Bailly, a former astronomer, examines with a telescope a chamber pot filled with constitutional decrees and erroneously suggests to his wife that hope may yet be discovered within,

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while she, confirming the scopic anxiety surrounding the assignat, worries about where he has left his glasses. Scatology of this kind had provided a common language for the expression of counterrevolutionary as well as revolutionary sentiment. For instance, Cas des assignats (fig. 20) assails the assignat’s frail international reputation by depicting stereotyped representatives of other European states wiping their backsides on the paper money, invoking a range of familiar psycho-social implications.92 This was a recognizable

format and, indeed, it may be that Cas des assignats was a rejoinder to Bref du Pape en 1791, a revolutionary print that mocked the angry papal response to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy by representing a leering revolutionary defecating on the papal bull. Camus had himself authored a reply to Rome, and it is possible that this had encouraged a derivative counterrevolutionary riposte in the form of a satire on assignats, for counterrevolutionary and revolutionary images regularly cross-pollinated one another.93

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Anxieties about the health of the national body frequently coalesced on the issue of speculation, described by Camille Saint-Aubin as a “ghost.”94 Speculation was a politically fluid charge, for while gambling with the nation’s wealth was the accusation made against the inventors of the assignat in caricatures such as L’homme aux assignats, speculation on the assignat was the bête noire of revolutionary conspiracists. Whereas publications such as Ange Goudar’s 1757 Histoire des Grecs had attempted to dignify private gambling with a history by equating it with and justifying it against legal financial speculation, for Burke, revolutionary France itself was a disordered world turned upside-down, in which the functions of state operated according to the random and hazardous principles of a game of risk.95 That this should be, in Burke’s words, the “vital breath” powering the body politic was a premonition of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s cynical appraisal of speculation and gambling at the Palais-Royal as the “systole” and “diastole” of the nation.96 Speculation, whether privately indulged or perpetrated on a national scale, was alleged to bring about a physical and mental decline. The Chevalier de Jaucourt, writing in the Encyclopédie, suggested that “the passion for gambling is one of the most fatal by which one can be possessed.” Furthermore, as de Jaucourt described, “the man is so violently agitated by the game, that he can no longer endure any other occupation. After having lost his fortune, he is condemned to be bored for the rest of his life.”97 A similar focus on bodily degeneration animates the lengthy printed denunciations, listing active Parisian maisons de jeu in the 1790s. We read of one response to a heavy loss: “At the moment when gold and banknotes flow in great streams from their cashier’s table, one [gambler] tears out their hair, another breaks his spoon, this one makes terrible imprecations, that one goes away pale like death, being hardly able to walk, his soul is so hardened, his heart so withered.”98

For this author, the actions of bankers of illegal games (known as “pigeons,” because of their “plumage”) caused immediate physical harm to the player—little wonder that Le Chapelier is represented as such an exploitative figure in L’homme aux assignats. In a paper presented to the Paris medical school on 22 pluviôse an XIII (11 February 1805), Benjamin Levraud, a doctor from Barbezieux, explained the detrimental effects that the gaming environment could have on persistent gamblers. The doors and windows kept shut for secrecy’s sake, a lack of circulating air in the gambling space spread infection. Dissimulation was both aetiology and symptom of the gambler’s physical disintegration. Furthermore, not only did speculation distort the value of currencies, it turned its practitioners into living caricatures whose facial disfigurement threatened their easy identification. Levraud tracked the changes that occurred to the gambler as he anticipated, began, and either won or lost a game. This task was not easily accomplished, for “nothing is more difficult to paint than the physiognomy of a player. The muscles of his face have acquired, by the frequency of their contractions, such mobility, that the same figure can be unrecognizable at each moment.”99 The task of counterrevolutionary caricature, in bringing to account revolutionaries who were accused of gambling with the nation’s wealth, was to identify those responsible, stripping away their dissimulative, variable masks and subjecting them to objective representation. However, caricature’s own exaggerations and lack of fixity function in an uneasy relationship to these precise claims, and we can read something of this uncertainty in the unwillingness of counterrevolutionary artists to exaggerate or deform the facial features of their subjects, apart from, perhaps, Camus’s disappearing nose. L’homme aux assignats is a print that is all about transparency, which is presented as a complex, unresolved sign of both political virtue and of political and financial degeneration,

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pushed to extreme, corporeally threatening conclusions. A year after the production of L’homme aux assignats, the removal of the king’s profile on the assignat would raise the stakes for this politically charged form of erasure. Yet the print represents Camus’s body—the revolutionary body—in a process of transition, for Camus is not quite yet made transparent. Rather, L’homme aux assignats and related images published in the early 1790s position the fragile and fragmented mass of paper currency as the contested, provisional revolutionary body, its boundaries redrawn to the many designs of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics. In so doing, these

images demonstrate the very real currency of caricature, its possibilities but also its limitations, and its intervention in a wide variety of practices, debates, and representations during the brief flowering of counterrevolutionary printmaking in 1790s France. More important, they articulate the precariousness of the assignat as a legitimate sign of value but also its utility, as an image or, rather, a competing aggregation of images that were central to how politically heterogeneous audiences negotiated the Revolution’s radical subversion of accepted criteria for political, material, and corporeal authenticity.

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C H A P T E R T WO

BETWEEN STATES PASSPORTS, CERTIFICATES, AND CITIZENS

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His request was commonplace enough. In nivôse year VI (17 December 1797), François Breton, a printer from the commune of Essonnes in the department of Seine-et-Oise, hoped to travel to Strasbourg to work on the new telegraph system that had revolutionized the transmission of information around France.1 In order to make this journey, in which he was to be joined by workers from all over the country, Breton needed a passport, to be obtained from his local administrative offices, and he had submitted the necessary request in writing accompanied by endorsements of his patriotism and virtue from two responsible local citizens. Breton’s application was successful, and he made his journey without deviation from a pre-agreed route. The quotidian aspect of this episode masks its deeply specific nature. At each significant checkpoint or upon request from the National Guard, Breton produced his passport to be examined for the relevant seals and signatures, and as often as not more were added. From this document, the clerk or soldier also learned the following information: Breton was twenty-six years old at the time, standing five foot two inches, with black hair and brown eyes. His “oval” face and “rounded” chin accommodated his “medium” mouth, while from his high forehead ran a slightly “pointed” nose.2 We can only assume that the next thing they did was have a good look at him. Breton had, of course, already received a thorough examination at the hands of the clerk who had made the manuscript descriptions in the spaces allowed on his printed passport; these descriptions were painstakingly reproduced in the ledgers of the administrative archive, whose approval Breton himself had signed. Every time he was required to produce his passport, the same procedure ensued; eyes flitted from document to face and back again, trying to connect the person in front of the desk with a textual breakdown of his facial characteristics—an assessment that was likely neither impartial nor value-free. Submitted to this judicial gaze, Breton yielded relatively little. He was obviously not consid-

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ered a threat and passed on his way, but for a time at least his identity, as figured on and by the passport, was at stake in a spectatorial encounter that privileged visual proof. Drawn from thousands of possible candidates, all with their own stories to tell, Breton’s case shows how the legitimacy of individual subjects in revolutionary France was established or denied in conjunction with an array of provisional images and fleeting visual connections.

Vieux Papiers As images produced and circulated in large numbers whose appearance was subject to constant close examination, passports shared much in common with assignats. Like banknotes, identity documents collated a number of typographical marks, stamps, and signatures on a paper surface. They operated in dynamic tension with recognized art forms, especially portraiture, but also with the images that later attempted to account for the Revolution’s paper culture (such as fig. 75). Segmenting and analyzing the body, passports both questioned and affirmed their bearers’ claims to be who they professed to be, and they required the regular juxtaposition of “true” and “false” images. Needless to say, as with assignats, these comparisons often resulted in confusion as much as resolution. Themselves ephemeral and mobile images, often issued for short periods and then disposed of or transported, folded, and unfolded to the point of disintegration, passports were a focus for debates about political legitimacy and mapped the uneven, unpredictable relationship between individuals and the revolutionary state (fig. 21). Revolutionary citizens were not formed overnight in 1790s France but were made aware of their position with regard to broader political changes, in different and not always positive ways, by their encounters with a range of documents and papers, all of which demanded their participation. Some of these meetings between subjects and papers were short-lived, momentary means to an

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end. Frequently, however, they were entangled with attempts to fix the encounter in time, to archive, and to make revolutionary history from the abbreviated, annotated, and approved minutiae of daily life. As traveling images with limited validity, passports were possessed of a pronounced temporal dimension to accompany their evident spatial qualities. This is encapsulated in the French term for this category of obsolete document: vieux papiers. Yet as with most images of this kind, their ostensible ephemerality was offset by preservation in the official institutions of revolutionary memory. Thinking about passports and similar identity documents—military congés, certificates, or membership cards—prompts a consideration of the various ways in which the physical presences of revolutionary subjects might slide in and out of the historical record, the blank spaces of the official form figuring as sites of possibility where a range of different identifications and self-identifications could be composed and decomposed (fig. 22).

Pressing contemporary debates about human rights, security, and immigration have, in recent years, become indissociable from the development of invasive new technologies of identification. Yet passports and identity documents were also central to late eighteenth-century debates about political freedom.3 Materializing a contradiction between revolutionary principles of universal liberty and the more pragmatic surveillance requirements of a centralized state, identity documents were a technology that not only represented state power but actively produced it. Debates about passports—in their embodied tension between the universal and the particular, the Rights of Man and the practical demands of revolutionary government, and in their occupation of an uncertain space between “identity” as understood to indicate similarity across a community and as a set of beliefs or positions peculiar to the individual—also mirrored several key aspects of the deliberations over slavery in France’s colonies. In addition, they offered a readymade framework through which

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Figure 21 Passport issued to Louis Baraud, département de la Seine inférieure, administration municipale du Havre. Engraving, manuscript, and printed stamps, 3 frimaire year VI (23 November 1797), verso and recto. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, L 86-164. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/Domaine de Vizille Figure 22 Carle Vernet [inv. del.] and François Godefroy [sculp.], Formulaire du congé absolu, 1798. Engraving. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1984.697. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/Domaine de Vizille

citizens in the metropole could imagine their own identity and those of racialized “others” in specifically physiognomic terms. However, in the form of the counterfeit or false identity or, I would suggest, even more threateningly, in the very structure of the pro forma template itself, the passport also offered a potential site for opposition or resistance to the power structures that motivated it. For Louis Marin, the passport might be taken to stand for the reflexive operation of representation itself. Claiming that “to represent will always be to present oneself representing something”—the given example of that “something” being a passport—Marin argues that at the same time this representation inevitably “constitutes its subject.”4 Yet perhaps due to a preconceived notion of what an archive should include, the visual aspect of the revolutionary passport has been sidelined in favor of the various kinds of textual meaning it might give up. This exaggerated separation of image and text belies the extent to which the textual and visual elements of such

documents were constitutive of one another, of the identity of the subjects who sought to represent themselves, and even of the police and bureaucrats who inspected and certified each passport. Developing their own image of the person described on a passport from the words on the page, those responsible for scrutinizing passports and their bearers established their own position in relation to the revolutionary body politic through those very acts of looking and description. Passports were inherently visual, even if they largely operated independently from the institutions that governed the making, display, and reception of art. The pretense of objectivity demonstrated in historical narrative printmaking during the Revolution, for which engravings such as those contained in the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française (see figs. 27, 38, 39, 74, 78) are paradigmatic, is shadowed by the passport’s status as a different kind of document, one that “went to work.”5 Defying print’s conventional denigration in artistic hierarchies for its

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resistance to singular authorship, the multiple authorship of the passport—its accretion of vignettes, descriptions, stamps, and signatures—signified increased authority rather than a fragmentation or dilution of agency. Yet in its specificity to its individual bearer the passport had the potential to put pressure on the universalizing characteristics of reproductive print media itself. In addition, the revolutionary tension between universalism and voluntarism was expressed through the material qualities of the passport. Despite the usefulness of printed pro formas to the state’s management of its citizens, by inserting the traces of impressions made by individual subjects—the notation of their names, ages, signatures, or identifying marks, but also deletions, doodles, and other marginalia—in a space defined by the totalizing depersonalized imperatives of state bureaucracy, the passport offered a site for its disruption. Against or alongside the passport as a model of the legislative control of circulation, we might posit the certificate—for instance, the certificates issued to conquerors of the Bastille or the Tuileries. These similar material forms served conversely as signifiers of solidity and permanence, making quite different claims about the role of revolutionary subjects in history. Like passports, commemorative and justificatory certificates made use of a variety of printed imagery and text, combined with manuscript additions in spaces allocated on a printed pro forma template, to indicate the authenticity of these documents as analogues of their bearers. Frequently, certificates and passports intersected with one another, and there was a certain amount of blurring between categories, for instance, in the case of certificates of permanent discharge from the military, membership cards for political clubs, or the birth certificates developed and institutionalized during this period that unequivocally incorporated individuals into historical analysis. However, certificates and passports embodied competing strands of revolutionary consciousness:

the ideal versus the everyday, the past against the present and future, the certain against the ambivalent, and a fixation on a static location contrasted with the possibility of unhindered movement. Unlike passports, which projected forward to a future voyage, certificates required recollection and reenactment, marking individual presence at specific places and times and claiming a past for revolutionary individuals that depended upon and popularized a collective recognition of significant events. Furthermore, whereas the certificate implied a subjectivity defined by inclusion, acknowledgment, and historical significance, the passport identified a liminal, mobile, always suspect subject, on the move both literally and conceptually, a distinction that took on highly charged new meanings in the revolutionary political sphere.

Policing the Face I wish that one might find curious men who conserve in their cabinets the formula of description that one gives to a man who wishes to make a journey. His height, his face, the color and the form of his features are detailed there with the most scrupulous exactitude, and moreover there should be two witnesses who are guarantees for the identity of his person.6 So wrote poet André Chénier in April 1791, imagining the archival legacy of the Revolution as an inventory of individual human countenances. Such an archive would provide the Revolution with the data necessary to analyze and monitor the daily movements of citizens, bequeathing a body of information that would inscribe the everyday events and individual participants of the Revolution in historical time. As counterrevolutionary caricature such as L’homme aux assignats demonstrated later that year, the archive was a disputed space (see fig. 10). Undoubtedly, taking into account its meticulous documentation of the portraits of individual revolutionaries,

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we might consider that image an overt attempt to turn the Revolution’s archival tendency and attempts to describe individual particularity against itself. Founded in 1790, the National Archives were not formally centralized until 1794. Nonetheless, attempts to chronicle and preserve the Revolution were in evidence from its earliest days. In somewhat anxious attempts to register its durability, the Revolution’s paper record was frequently incorporated into proposals for monuments, and projects such as that conceived by the artist Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux, one of the principal designers of assignats, were not uncommon (fig. 23). Often, as with Palloy’s manipulation of the remnants of the Bastille, these projects focused on the symbolic spaces of the Revolution’s early years, and Gatteaux’s project was ostensibly conceived to memorialize the 1790 Festival of the Federation. Gatteaux suggested that a giant column in the form of a fasces be built on the site of the Bastille, each of its lances representing a département. Set in a circular surround, this “durable monument” would include a repository of all the laws and resolutions passed by every government under the Revolution and every other document useful to the state.7 Below this tower of paper Gatteaux imagined shops and other amenities, whose income would fund the library above.8 Central to the passport and to the archive that reproduced and perpetuated its information was the description of the bearer as having been seen. Some documents, such as a passport issued to forty-year-old Louis Baraud to travel from Amiens to Dieppe (see fig. 21), are virtually obscured by the quantity of manuscript information concerned with the inspection of the circulating subject. This was contingent on the length of the voyage, the number of checkpoints passed, and the assiduousness of the police and administrators encountered. As the verso side of this document shows, each inspection required a textual confirmation that the official had seen Baraud’s “plump and colored” face, a declaration that

always began “seen” (vu)—at Abbeville, at Soissons, and so on. In this confirmation of presence, passport and passport-carrier were merged, for both needed to be witnessed so that they could pass on together. Sometimes the inspection was alluded to explicitly by the addition of a stamped vignette featuring an eye sited, in the case of the Parisian bureau, within a Masonic triangle, or alongside a magnifying glass. The document allocated in brumaire year VII (November 1798) to Augustin Désiré, a merchant from the commune of Mans in the department of Sarthe, went even further (fig. 24). At the head of the paper, a triangle formed the frame for an eye, the pupil doubling as the weight for a plumb line descending from the triangle’s apex.9 The eyelid of this fragment is inscribed “surveillance,” forming a triumvirate with the more conventional “liberté” and “egalité” on either side of it and reimagining “fraternité” as a bond between (male) citizens and an omnipresent, all-seeing state.10 The description of Désiré’s blond hair and beard, round face, medium nose and mouth, and ruddy skin (marked with a little smallpox scar) is anticipated and endorsed by the placing of this image at the head of the document.11 The law of 28 March 1792 concerning passports set out in clear terms exactly what a passport should say about its bearer.12 First came the basic terms of issue and the administrative constraints on the voyage. This began with the département, district, and municipality of the issuing office, followed by the instruction to “laissez passer . . . [the bearer’s name]” and the addition “français ou étranger,” to delete as applicable. A subtle equivalence was made here between individual and financial circulation—“laissez faire et laissez passer” was the maxim of eighteenth-century French free trade economists. Then followed the bearer’s current address and his or her département, district, and municipality of origin. The second part of the passport carried the descriptive weight; listed here were the bearer’s profession and, more important, age, height,

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Figure 23 Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux [inv.] and François-Noel Sellier [sculp.], Projet d’un monument pour consacrer la Révolution, 1790. Etching and engraving. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 24 Passport issued to Augustin Désiré, département de la Sarthe, commune du Mans. Engraving, manuscript, and printed stamps, 26 brumaire year VII (16 November 1798), recto. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, L 97-312. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/Domaine de Vizille

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hair, and eyebrow and eye colors. Space was provided for descriptions of, in order, the forehead, nose, mouth, beard, chin, and face (visage). This order of description encouraged a drifting, downward gaze, the textual identifiers being inscribed on the passports according to their positions on the face. Such an appraisal must have required a degree of descriptive intelligence on behalf of the issuing authority, and it was achieved with varying degrees of precision or success. Although many descriptions on passports appear cursory or standardized (we read, for instance, of many “medium” mouths), it seems certain that a commonly recognized vocabulary was desirable if officials were to systematize the terse textual descriptors on the passports into a universally comprehensible language that would allow the description to correlate with the individual to which it referred.13 As we have seen with reference to assignats, standardization of imagery was considered essential for the generation of stable meanings. This was not, however, easily achieved in a period during which identification via this kind of physical description moved from the apprehension of criminals to the scrutiny of all citizens. Even though some form of manuscript description had been a component of French identity documentation since at least 1718, its consistency and significance were heightened in a revolutionary context characterized by a desire for universal transparency.14 The assimilation of individuals to such generalized forms of description was all the more problematic given the troubled evolution of the passport in the early 1790s. On 29 July 1790, with the euphoria generated by the emancipatory and fraternal rhetoric of the Festival of the Federation a very recent memory, a deliberation signed by the lawyer Jacques Peuchet, head of police administration for the Paris commune and later garde des archives for the Parisian police, appeared in Le Moniteur. Equating freedom to travel with the right to breathe freely, Peuchet associated the imposition of passport

controls with the “tyranny” of the Ancien Régime.15 Twelve days later, the same author elaborated his point, describing passports as “a fruit of religious inquisition” and railing against the “social injustice” that maintained their use.16 For the reader of Le Moniteur, the references would have been clear, for the “chains” with which the opening salvo of Rousseau’s Social Contract claimed the free-born man is bound referred directly, if perhaps metaphorically, to the obstruction of personal movement as a symptom of oppression.17 Peuchet’s claims were more than hyperbole, for AncienRégime restrictions on the free movement of individuals were inconsistent and often draconian. Passports were frequently issued at excessive prices to extract revenue from merchants and other professional travelers, who were not the only professional or social group to be explicitly targeted.18 Alongside diplomatic passports and those issued for the containment of contagion in case of epidemic or, bearing only a name, for the dead, artisanal passports were also widely demanded in eighteenth-century France to prevent foreigners from profiting from industrial secrets.19 The largely peripatetic body of colporteurs (traveling peddlers of books and tracts) and the journeymen who made up much of the workforce for the printing trade were, of course, bound to such regulations.20 French people had been generally forbidden to cross their national borders since 1669, while internal regulations specified that travelers within France, if not in possession of a valid passport issued in their hometown, must own an aveu, a testimony of their morality from a local religious authority.21 Likewise, merchants and the military regularly carried on their travels a sauf-conduit, a paper request for safekeeping in the name of a higher authority, while the military congé or leave of absence also depended on endorsement. As the Encyclopédie noted drily, there were subtle differences between such documents, for “the passport itself, is given only to friends; one gives sauf-conduits to enemies.”22 This coexistence of officially

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sanctioned passports and other less formal documentation did not subside under the Revolution, although it took on a more streamlined shape, as attestations of virtue had to be supplied from several sources before a passport could be issued. The formal differences between passports and declarations were often slight, with both types of document containing spaces in the printed text for a handwritten description of the bearer. This system was unevenly enforced and often thought to be corrupt, a perception enhanced by the dubious circumstances surrounding the departure of notorious figures such as John Law, whose flight was made possible by the regent’s procurement of suitable documents. In addition, it was hindered by overlapping administrative regions and the fact that the majority of travelers in eighteenth-century France moved on foot.23 Consequently, in the early months of the Revolution, passports were considered a constraint upon individual and universal liberty and their imposition appeared as a regular grievance in the cahiers de doléances. To some extent, the reevaluation of the passport was part of a general reorganization of Ancien-Régime bureaucratic procedures, as the various bureaux of revolutionary France purged old staff and procedures to train a new generation of administrators schooled in revolutionary ideology.24 These changes may have allowed a space for antipassport rhetoric to develop, but they did not rule out the possibility of the passports’ recontextualization in revolutionary colors. Countering the utopian desire to do away with passports altogether was a visceral popular response to the demographic changes brought about by the Revolution. An influx of foreign sympathizers, widespread and recurrent food shortages, deserting soldiers, and the threat of hostile invasion all contributed to an anxiety about internal security that focused attention on mendicants or “vagabonds,” travelers sans aveu suspected of targeting provisions for poor relief at the expense of local beneficiaries.25 As British agriculturalist Arthur Young bitterly

observed in the context of his repeated obstruction and arrest as a suspicious foreigner, “these passports are new things from new men in new power and show that they do not bear new honours too meekly.”26 The houses of Parisian Jews and perceived and real immigrants were raided regularly by the police; the absence of identity documents served, from the early days of the Revolution, as an admission of guilt.27 Conviction, if linked to other crimes, would later lead to “Dame Guillotine” issuing “passports for the other world,” as one satirist put it.28 Passports not only required that an individual’s identity be conceived in terms defined by their printed documentation but that both the pasts and futures of revolutionary subjects be offered up for inspection and analysis. “Foreignness,” however, increasingly came to be defined in political rather than solely geographical terms, augmenting a sense that the possession of a passport might operate as a signifier of revolutionary identity. A fear of imagined and unimaginable menaces within France’s borders was exacerbated by reports of sinister priests and aristocrats attempting to flee the country in disguise, often as members of the National Guard. The Friends of the Constitution of Mans were typical in their denunciation of these transgressive individuals. In a letter to Jérôme Pétion, mayor of Paris, they revealed the departure for Paris of more than three hundred refractory priests, disguised as soldiers and “armed” with passports. Hysterically described as a “horde of vampires,” the refractory priests possessed an unstable corporate identity lodged somewhere between certified citizenry and monstrous others, their apparently legitimate passports the primary tool of their subversion. Of course, true National Guards were also required to carry specific certification, formalizing Lafayette’s call in August 1789 for a paper “oath” to protect against the militancy within the ranks that ultimately necessitated the Federation. For the bearer, this certificate was to stand as “a monument to the services that he has rendered to the nation.”29 However, the historical endorsement provided by between states | 51

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such documents did little to protect against the insidious threat of dissimulative, unstable, and dangerous performances of revolutionary identity on behalf of the Revolution’s enemies. The so-called Great Fear that permeated rural communities in July and August 1789 had an inevitable effect in urban environments.30 The legal outcome to an initial relaxation of identity documentation was authoritarian, a decree of 30 May–13 June 1790 sanctioning the forced repatriation of all non-French travelers without an aveu who had been resident in the capital for less than a year, and of all French nationals who had lived there for fewer than six months.31 These alien or excluded individuals were offered, free of charge, a passport to ensure their safe return to their country or municipality of origin. Indicating the exact route the bearer had to take, these passports carried a right to three sous per connection or checkpoint, up to a maximum of ten sous, and each distribution of money was stamped assiduously on the passport.32 Refusal to comply meant arrest and prison, prefiguring the passport’s use by the commissaires, gendarmerie, and other factions of the revolutionary police as an apparatus to trap and control draft dodgers, speculators, and the drifting, semicriminal ranks of marchands, fripeurs, brocanteurs, prostitutes, and street performers, their professions clearly marked by metal tags—the paperless individuals whose itinerant status made them the most common scapegoats for counterrevolution and sedition.33 Lack of conformity and refusal to submit to uniform documentation marked these people out not as distinct individuals but as a massed, amorphous, and dangerous crowd—a crowd, moreover, likely to be populated by furtive cross-dressing spies. Inflected by a Rousseauist concern about the dissimulative character of all forms of image making, the revolutionary passport may be read as an attempt to tie down the provisional, dangerously mobile signifiers of the viewed or visually recorded face, to police the boundaries of individual bodies as

a way of regulating a body politic in a process of constant transformation.

Recognition Narratives The attempt by the royal family to flee Paris on 20 June 1791 was, as has already been noted, a crucial turning point in the Revolution.34 Not only did the king’s dereliction of duty and abandonment of his people allow for a radical renegotiation of his authority, it was also the point at which the king, recognized against an assignat (see fig. 18), might be said to have lost control over his own image. The power of Louis’s portrait was undone by comparison with the physical person of the king. Yet Louis was also compared to another piece of paper that helped reveal his true identity and the scale of his deception, for he had traveled as a valet on a fake passport in the name of the Baron de Korff. Prior to the royal family’s departure, in February 1791 the ire of the Paris commune and the popular press had already been roused by requests for passports received from the king’s aunts, setting the ground for the response to the king’s flight and the reigniting of apprehensions about external invasion and internal conspiracy.35 Louis’s exploitation of revolutionary bureaucracy made a more stringent approach seem viable, but it also showed the breadth of the gap between the physical body and the royal body politic, and that the official image of Louis was, like the passport, just another mask. A contemporary caricature after John Nixon, published in London by Fores under the title Le Gourmand: Heavy Birds Fly Slow; Delay Breeds Danger and reproduced in France despite its anti-French sentiment, situates the passport at the center of the narrative (fig. 25). The scene shows a gluttonous Louis being accosted with mock-obsequiousness by the procureur Sauce, backed up by five hussards, their headwear adorned with skulls and crossbones. To the left of the image,

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Figure 25 Isaac Cruikshank after John Nixon, Le Gourmand: Heavy Birds Fly Slow; Delay Breeds Danger; A Scene at Varennes, June 21 1791, 1791. Colored etching. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum

Marie-Antoinette is shown admiring herself in a mirror, her narcissism, like the king’s appetite, undiminished in the face of danger. Perhaps a parodic reference to the reflective surfaces of Versailles and the dissimulation of the royal toilette, this motif concentrates attention on the physiognomy of the queen as a sign of criminal recognition, and it employs the bifocal logic of a mug shot. The dauphin sits sour-faced at the back of the room, attended by a nurse, a detail that reinforces the charge of familial neglect commonly directed at the queen.36 On the rear wall are mounted three frames, each containing a representation of a contemporary image. On the left, Louis XIV, lightning in hand, stands atop a pile of cowering subjects. Louis XVI, two turkeys and six bottles of wine to the good, is shown to have diverged calamitously from this Apollonian archetype, in terms of both his physical appearance and embodied power. To the far right of this image is a representation of the storming of the Bastille. The circumstances of Le Gourmand’s publication demonstrates British artists’ familiarity with prints from revolutionary France, while the revolutionary iconography of this image within an image furthers the incongruity of the royal family’s presence in such a

humble setting and provides an interesting insight, albeit fictionalized, into the display of revolutionary images in a provincial interior.37 The humorous reversal of the king’s discovery in such surroundings is alluded to by the inversion of the print in the center—the passport—turned upside-down at a jaunty angle.38 The setting of the passport between a prerevolutionary and a revolutionary image locates the document in a distinctly visual register and articulates a narrative of revolutionary triumph, with the king unmasked by the vigilant gaze of the revolutionary citizenry. The king’s passport, the material manifestation of his deceit, has been literally “turned over,” in a manner comparable to the Bastille in the right-hand frame. Ironically, following his flight to Switzerland after his involvement in the Babeuf conspiracy, Drouet, the postmaster who recognized Louis at Varennes, was later subject to a similarly judicial identification, and his signalement, signed by officers Limodin and Bréon, was dispersed widely in the form of a poster.39 The king, on the other hand, was rendered featureless; traveling as a valet, he did not require a personal description. Nixon’s caricature shows Louis run to fat, his lack of facial

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distinction in stark contrast to the presentation of MarieAntoinette, whose sharp features mark her out as the real power behind the throne. In a similar way to the assignat, the slow process of “defacing” the king was integral to his delegitimization, and sometimes, as here, it appeared self-inflicted. Against this background the eradication of passports laid down in the Constitution of September 1791 seems sudden and incongruous, although it was in fact in keeping with the liberal opinions that had been dominant on the subject prior to the flight to Varennes, and the bill was passed unopposed. Referring to article seven of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the law guaranteed “as natural and civil rights the liberty of all men to go, to stay, to leave, without being stopped or detained other than according to the forms determined by the Constitution,” a freedom that, in the spirit of liberty and disavowal of Ancien-Régime despotism, even extended briefly to émigrés.40 The king’s flight, rather than encouraging a long-lived reimposition of passport controls, was, for a time at least, viewed as further evidence for the passport’s overthrow, for was it not a passport that had facilitated the king’s escape in the first place? The removal of passports removed the temptation to dissimulate, while its appropriation in such sinister circumstances had proved its royal and repressive affinities. This optimistic period of free circulation was shortlived, as hostile armies began to gather on France’s borders. By late 1791 the newly constituted Legislative Assembly was beginning to grumble about conspiracy and the need for surveillance, as many frontier départements began to reissue passports independently. Between February and March 1792, ostensibly in the name of a repeated fear of “brigandage,” passports were reintroduced and the National Guard was ordered to examine all passports and arrest anyone without the required information. Without a listed means of subsistence, citizens had to provide the name of a local sponsor or risk

categorization as “suspicious.”41 The debates of this period may be seen to provide a logical conclusion to the fallout of the king’s departure, which had not been sufficiently dealt with by the relaxation of passport laws. Whereas previously identities—those of women, children, and servants especially—had been allowed to merge deceptively in the form of the group passport, from this point on each individual was required to account for his or her own documentation and to be able to do so at all times.

Seeing Other People The universalist tendency of the vocabulary employed on passports was part of a wider reevaluation of the functions of language and the role of signs in revolutionary France.42 We might, for instance, consider it alongside the “questionnaire” organized in prairial year II (June 1794) by the Abbé Grégoire to describe and extinguish regional dialect, and by doing so to establish a single “mother tongue.”43 Like the passport, Grégoire’s project was a classificatory text. In an attempt to form a coherent revolutionary symbolic order in which the shortest words were considered closest to nature, the authors of the project utilized a system of questions to reconstitute an elusive, fragmented subject. Equally compellingly, however, as Nixon’s print suggests, the descriptions on passports can be understood as engaging productively with visual conventions, particularly those of portraiture and its distortions in caricature. Most immediately relevant were the gradations of moral virtue according to physical appearance that were central to physiognomical discourse, a totalizing set of strategies that “fostered an etymological approach to the face,” although other aspects of portraiture intersected with the descriptive content of the passport too.44 Portrait production during the Revolution proved to be one of the most effective sites for the articulation of revolu-

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tionary attitudes to the individual.45 Capable of functioning both honorifically and repressively, portraits were particularly susceptible to shifts in political power. They could, perhaps more than any other art form, move from legitimizing the actions of their subjects to documenting supposedly aberrant behavior, while over time these characteristics could even be discerned in the same image. As photographer and theorist Allan Sekula explains, in the context of nineteenth-century police photography, portraiture itself is inherently dialectical, its allegiance inevitably ambivalent, for “every proper portrait has its lurking, objectifying inverse in the files of the police.”46 Sekula’s analysis is germane. In 1793, the Convention decreed that a description of Philippe Nicolas Marie de Pâris, assassin of Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, be printed and posted around the capital, published in the bulletin of the Convention, and distributed to all eighty-four departments in order to speed his capture—a “wanted” poster in a format now familiar as a cliché of the twentieth-century Western movie, but lacking, of course, the ubiquitous photographic mug shot. At the same time that David was beginning work on his martyr-portrait of Le Peletier (fig. 26)—a painting dependent on a balance between idealization and easy recognition of its subject, and a “proper portrait” if there ever were one—an “objectifying inverse” textual portrait of the murderer shared the very same Convention hall where David’s rendering of the victim, the now destroyed pendant to his Marat assassiné, was to hang: “Pâris: Height five feet five inches, blue beard, black hair, swarthy complexion, beautiful teeth: wearing a gray houpelande with a green lining, and a round hat.”47 The specific (not to mention subtly racialized) overtones of this description of Pâris contrast with David’s classicized representation of Le Peletier, whose face is turned sideways to address the viewer directly and to draw attention away from Le Peletier’s large nose. However, whereas commemorative certificates may be aligned with the bourgeois individualism

Sekula views as the progenitor of the “proper portrait,” the passport occupies a more unstable, ambiguous position between portraiture’s competing tendencies. It raises the possibility of a police file that functions “honorifically,” an archive that validates and entitles, for by repressively claiming rights to an individual’s description, the revolutionary passport paradoxically enabled their circulation. Rather than simply seeing portraiture as an explanatory device for revolutionary documentation, revolutionary certificates, passports, and identity papers may be seen to stage a contrary effect, complicating our understanding of portraiture and the media used to achieve it. Toward the end of the 1790s a series of portraits appeared, in addition to the more familiar topographies of historical events, in the long-running series Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française (1791–1817).48 Those depicted were the “great men” of the Revolution, represented in a format inherited from Ancien-Régime traditions of portraiture that featured an image of the sitter above a text. This exemplum virtutis aimed to educate patriotic citizens by memorializing the Revolution’s political and military leaders. The images may be considered paradigmatic “honorific” portraits, combining classical attributes and textual accolades to enhance the sitters’ mythical reputations. However, this series honored not only the living but the dead, and documented aristocrat, king, priest, and counterrevolutionary alongside the revolutionary hero. Images of Marie-Antoinette, Charlotte Corday, and Dumouriez were published in a series that also contained portraits of Robespierre and Marat. Although increasingly weighted toward military leaders, the series directly addressed France’s recent political history, including images of prominent figures from the Terror period such as the public prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville, who, according to the text beneath his portrait, had been “convicted of having signed acts of accusation that contained an endless number of blanks, spaces, and names inserted without approval.” between states | 55

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Figure 26 Anatole Devosge after Jacques-Louis David, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort, 1793. Charcoal drawing. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, inv. sup. 5-D. Photo: Hugo Martens

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Although attention to the physiognomic differences between individuals was a characteristic shared between “high” and “low” art, from the systematic facial tropes of Le Brun to the aggressive distortions and appropriations of caricature, these images were enhanced by the texts that echoed the narratives and descriptions seen on passports. For instance, Mirabeau is described in a print of 1798 (fig. 27) as having “robust health, an imposing gait, a loud and relentless voice, great audacity, much knowledge, even more intrigue.” The account of Mirabeau’s physical and emotional properties soon shifted to an indication of his suspect status as a man of “intrigue.” Conversely, following a description of Corday’s composed and articulate justification for her actions and her politically conscious death, we read how “her head was high without pride, her gaze free without disdain, her features expressive and animated without anger.” Nevertheless, this was tempered by a characteristically judicial refusal to absolve her crime, and a reminder that the details of her transgression would be retained alongside those of other offenders, for “her memory will pass into posterity like that of all the great criminals; because one cannot pardon the assassin, even that of Marat.” As for Marat himself, “he was a man not five feet high; he combined the most hideous outward appearance with the lowest and most sordid inclinations.” The 1798 advertisement for the series in Le Moniteur, by Auber, its publisher, emphasized the surveillance connotations of the historical project. As Auber described, “These portraits are perfect resemblances: the subjects engraved below are composed and executed by Duplessi-Bertaux, the Callot of our days; below these aforementioned subjects, one will find the history of the public and private life of the person whose portrait is presented.”49 The accumulative portrait series in the Tableaux was artistic practice in a bureaucratic mode, selfconsciously archiving the participation of individual figures in history. In this sense, they share much with David’s series of

Figure 27 Charles-François-Gabriel Levachez [inv. del. medallion] and Jean Duplessi-Bertaux [inv. del. vignette], Honoré, Gabriel, Riquetti, Mirabeau, député de Provence aux États généraux de 1789, mort le 2 avril 1791, from Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, 1798/1817. Aquatint, etching, and engraving. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum

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Figure 28 Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Jeanbon Saint-André, 1795. Pen and black ink and black and gray wash, with pale yellow wash and white gouache, over graphite, on tan laid paper, laid down on cream laid card. Helen Regenstein Collection, 1973.153, The Art Institute of Chicago. Photo © The Art Institute of Chicago

portrait miniatures of Jacobin deputies, which he appropriately enough painted during his second spell in prison in 1795 (fig. 28). Utilizing a profile format that mimicked the signifying power of coinage, David’s images examine a prison community through an “oculus of posterity.”50 However, this ideal is subverted, for as Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has observed, the uncompromising realism of these profiles “bring to mind the diagnostic gaze of an eighteenth-century physiognomist” while “the Jeanbon Saint-André, for example, looks rather like a mug shot.”51 The “perfect” resemblances of revolutionary figures in the Tableaux went further in exposing both the public and private lives of their subjects, forming an “honorific” collection that viewed together resembles a police file, retrospectively reordered with the addition of new information.

Spaces of Difference Revolutionary identification aimed at an inclusive, panoptic documentation of citizens, but it also worked to circumscribe who might be considered a citizen in the first place. The “blanks” of the printed form defined and limited the thinkable, drawing attention to questions that had not been asked, for which no space had been allocated to inscribe a response. As Marin’s elision of the difference between “blank” and “blanc” implies, it also promised an empty space staged to accommodate normative, white values.52 The “portrait” on the passport exposed, often negatively, those sectors of society that French revolutionaries could not incorporate easily into the revolutionary polity—in particular women and racial others. Yet these lacunae in revolutionary documentation are them-

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selves legible, telling of unequal access to and presence within the archival record, and also of inequitable, provisional existences as citizen subjects. The outbreak of the Haitian Revolution posed particular problems, as the sheer unthinkability of the slave insurrection in France led to a reconstruction of events according to readymade categories, a pro forma model of political engagement incompatible with the reality of events in Saint-Domingue.53 In this context, a fruitful comparison can be made between the representative work done by passports and a unique image of a citizen subject from Saint-Domingue, painted by a French artist. Anne-Louis Girodet’s Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-representative of the Colonies (fig. 29) is a painting defined by ambivalence, combining aspects of racial stereotyping and the undoubted influence of Lavater’s physiognomical treatises with an apparently positive representation of liberty in the colonies.54 In this work, the singularity of an image of a black man occupying the exclusive canvas of elite French artistic practice is only outweighed in rarity by his representation as a French soldier and citizen. As many scholars have noted, in painting his portrait of Belley, Girodet was working through a range of issues relating to otherness, nationhood, representation, transparency, and freedom that had been current in France for some years. Might we also read the unstable, precarious claims to identity made in Girodet’s Portrait of Citizen Belley against wider debates concerning identity documentation current at the time, in both France and Saint-Domingue? Although there was, as in France, a healthy market in counterfeits and illegally obtained pro formas, in pre-emancipation Saint-Domingue any white person could stop a slave and demand to see his or her identity documents. Even on arrival in the metropole, colonial travelers, as Jean-Baptiste Belley was in 1794, also had to obtain a passport at their first port of entry and at each subsequent stage of their journey.55 However, the acquisition of appropriate passes was also

essential to the organization of the meetings that led to the slave rebellion of 1791, while as Laurent Dubois has shown in the context of postemancipation Guadeloupe, wedding, birth, and death declarations in the état civil became powerful means of self-identification. Provided with access to forms of documentation from which they had previously been excluded, free citizens enthusiastically involved themselves in the process of self-description—as “African” or as “from the coast.”56 As Dubois outlines, the “naming of race” was crucial to the formation of a postemancipation order that was constituted, in part at least, through the completion and storage of these documents.57 Whereas legal documentation in French colonies was traditionally based upon an assumed standard of whiteness that recorded only those who deviated from an ethnic norm, after emancipation officials looked for experimental descriptors, such as “European,” that marked racial difference without referring to skin color.58 These uses demonstrate the speed with which the passport could shift from signifying ownership and restriction of movement to symbolizing liberty and universal rights, opposing strands that were never reconciled. Little wonder that upon his arrival in Philadelphia during his long voyage to France, Belley was violently divested of his papers as well as his uniform when attacked by an angry mob, for the possession of documents signified an inclusion that was intolerable to those who defended slavery. Although gradations of ethnicity and origin in Saint-Domingue were complex and irrevocably linked to social status—gens de couleur, for instance, was a category that covered a diverse sector of society of often distant African descent in Saint-Domingue—such subtleties were not always observed in France. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby records a case from prairial year II (June 1794) that illuminates how racial difference was registered in France at this time. Grigsby describes how the passport of Joseph Boisson, a black deputy from Saintbetween states | 59

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Figure 29 Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-representative of the Colonies, 1797. Oil on canvas. Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo: RMN/Gérard Blot

Domingue, demarcated Boisson’s racial difference in the absence of a section on the printed form where it could be indicated.59 Although Napoleonic passports later included a section in which to describe “complexion” (teint), the appearance of this category was fairly irregular and there was confusion as to how it should be completed. This section was often left blank or filled in with the single word “colored” (coloré), which could variously indicate skin color or, for instance, a “ruddy” complexion. In the place of such a prompt, a clerk at Brest used the adjectival space afforded him to signify the passport bearer’s “blackness.” Boisson’s hair was described as “black frizzy,” his nose “large,” his face “round black,” and his forehead “low bowed.” These generalized and more specifically physiognomical descriptions were the basis of Boisson’s identification in France as a subservient, racially inferior individual—exaggerated and standardized physical typologies conditioning his social and political status, and consequently, his membership in the revolutionary collective. Grigsby makes a fascinating parallel between the classification of Boisson and Girodet’s portrait of Boisson’s friend Belley. As she elaborates, “Girodet in his studio stared at Belley as the clerk had stared at Boisson. And he too faced the challenge of adapting an existing set of conventions and skills to the description of the particularity of a novel person. He and the clerk performed commensurate jobs.”60 At play here was a politics of recognition that saw artist and clerk collaborating in their representations via common reference to established conventions of schematizing racial difference. Yet when claims for universal rights came up against the materialization of the revolutionary universal in the form of the passport, the document itself was found lacking. Girodet himself was not without experience of the possibilities of mistaken identity, having been stopped as a possible royalist spy in the Dauphiné on his way to Rome and repeatedly arrested and intimidated on his journey through

Italy. In self-imposed yet fraught exile, Girodet was “menaced at Rome, humiliated at Naples, suspected in Venice and constantly dubious in the eyes of the local authorities.”61 I am wary of reiterating accounts of Girodet’s practice in which his biography and complex artistic persona already feature prominently. Nonetheless, we might propose a self-aware relationship to the conditions of alterity, as mediated by documentation, during this period of Girodet’s life. During his trip to Rome, Girodet had carried about his person a range of documents taken from the archives of the Bastille on and after 14 July, probably sold to him as a souvenir by a colporteur. This set of papers was treated as if it possessed protective powers, certifying Girodet’s origins and stabilizing his own uneasy relationship to revolutionary France, from which he had been absent for many years by the time he painted his portrait of Belley.62 In messidor year IV (June 1796), the year before he painted Belley, Girodet applied for a passport to travel from Paris to his hometown of Montargis. The Archives Nationales contain this document (fig. 30), as well as two handwritten requests by the artist, citing a letter written by the author Pierre Ginguené to the Minister of the Interior Pierre Bénézech in support of this application.63 In Lavater’s influential model, handwriting, as well as facial physiognomy, betrayed moral “type,” potentially implicating the clericalartistic author of the classifying document as the subject of an analysis equal to that which they produced. Somewhere between the situation described by Barthes, wherein writing is “the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing,” and an embrace of the fiction of the fully autonomous author, in physiognomic discourse the author is necessarily present, classifying yet equally elusive and classified.64 In the case of both passport and portrait, these intersubjective, cross-media connections disrupted any notion of a singular authorial agency. between states | 61

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Figure 30 Passport issued to Anne-Louis Girodet, artist. Engraving, manuscript, and printed stamps, messidor year IV (June 1796). Archives Nationales de France, Paris, AN F7 3570. Photo: author Figure 31 Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Self-Portrait, 1795. Oil on canvas. Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo: RMN/ Gérard Blot

We have no proof to suggest that Girodet’s submission to this procedure, the description of his chestnut hair and eyebrows, blue eyes, straight nose, big mouth, round chin, and oval face—corroborated by his own self-portrait of 1795 (fig. 31)—his height (five feet four inches), his age (twentynine), his place of birth (Montargis, department of Loiret), and his profession in any way directly influenced the production of his portrait of Belley. Nonetheless, we might suppose that the clerk’s itemization of the artist’s facial characteristics also encouraged an awareness of Belley’s difference or, more specifically, the conventions used to describe it, distinctions that Girodet’s portrait dramatizes to striking effect. Girodet’s Portrait of Citizen Belley recognizes that the documentation of the face was a requirement of citizenship and attempts to

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make good the absence of an appropriate language with which to describe a citizen of color.

Paperwork Given these circumstances, the passport could not remain a neutral object and, as with the assignat, the material qualities of the document itself became intrinsic to its political meaning. Corresponding to the wealth of descriptive detail contained in every passport and the individuality conferred by the different routes, qualifiers, signatures, and stamps on which the authority of each passport was based was the huge variety in the form such documents could take. Whether passports had a vertical format or (less commonly) a horizontal one, which calendar they used, and the amount of description it was thought appropriate to add all varied. For most of the Revolution, passports differed in style and iconography according to the department or municipality in which they were issued, although this extended mostly to the borders, font, and letterhead, while the printed textual content aspired to universality. Indeed, before 1789 the majority of political documents, particularly those circulating outside the capital, had little or no decoration, apart from the occasional ornate typographic line or oversized initial capital.65 Stereotyping of vignettes had been common in Paris, especially for laws or military congés, from the 1780s, but this practice did not for the most part disseminate to the provinces, accounting for a variety in production.66 Handwritten passports were, however, unsatisfactory, usually resulting from a lack of printed documents rather than preference. In a reversal of printing’s conventional relationship to the written word, handwritten passports usually directly copied the format and wording of official printed versions. Some highly decorated documents, such as a congé designed by Beugnet from the year IV, drew attention to their own materiality by representing, on the

left-hand side of the image, a soldier holding his paperwork (fig. 32). This self-referential mise en abyme, which both anticipated the document’s use and portrayed a generic bearer, was a motif that actually predated the Revolution. However, it was transformed by its appearance in a revolutionary context in which “to present oneself representing something” was of immediate political significance. The majority of passports printed in Paris were produced under the auspices of the national printing workshops, in their various institutional guises. Here, as with assignat production, security was strict, with workers required to carry identity cards and subjected to frequent checks.67 The penalty for noncompliance was severe, with workers denounced to the committee of their local section and treated as suspects.68 Friction within the institutions charged with printing official documents was long-standing. The former Imprimerie Royale, which had been responsible for printing acts of government under Anisson-Duperron’s management, was, despite its reconfiguration as the Imprimerie du Louvre, frequently accused of harboring workers with aristocratic sympathies. Suspected of having fired on the people at the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, the director was forced to appeal to the Assembly on behalf of his employees.69 On 27 frimaire year II (17 December 1793), following a decree of 25 brumaire (15 November), the lottery was suppressed, and from the debris of its workshops the first governmental printers, the Imprimerie des Administrations Nationales, were created. Following a decree of 8 pluviôse year III (27 January 1795), the Imprimerie du Louvre and the Imprimerie du Bulletin des Lois (responsible for the journal of that name) were reunited as the Imprimerie Nationale. Shortly afterward, on 21 ventôse year III (11 March 1795), the workers of the Imprimerie des Administrations Nationales addressed a petition to the Convention contesting their incorporation into the Hôtel Penthièvre, where the Imprimerie Nationale was between states | 63

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Figure 32 Jean Beugnet, Congé absolu, pour passer aux vétérans, délivré à Médart, ca. 1794. Wood engraving with ink additions. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1984.431. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/ Domaine de Vizille Figure 33 Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux [inv.] and Pierre-Alexandre Tardieu [sculp.], assignat, four hundred livres, 1792. Etching, engraving, and typography on watermarked paper. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

based. The Imprimerie des Administrations Nationales claimed that their establishment, by employing nearly three hundred people, was singularly beneficial to the Republic.70 However, successive decrees of 18 germinal (7 April), 21 prairial (9 June), and 8 pluviôse (28 January 1796) recommended that printed material paid for by the state should only be made at the newly formed Imprimerie de la République, sparking revolt among Parisian printers, who argued that it was an institution historically based on privilege. Despite this opposition, the Imprimerie des Administrations Nationales was indeed united with the Imprimerie de la République, a setup that remained in place until Napoleon’s reorganization of it as the Imprimerie Impériale.71 Although the basic questions the passport asked were regulated, it was not until the military expansion of the Empire that passports came to look alike across France. Interestingly, once formulated as such, the technology of paper money provided the most ready reference. Alexandre-Jacques-Laurent Anisson-Duperron, an auditor of the Ministry of Finances and the Treasury from 1806 to 1809 and inspector general of the Imprimerie Impériale from 1809, encouraged this connection in

a letter of 1810. This man’s father, Étienne Anisson-Duperron, had been the director of the Imprimerie Royale and Imprimerie Nationale until his execution on 6 floréal year II (25 April 1794) and had been responsible for the early production of assignats. Alexandre-Jacques-Laurent remarked how “these objects have been made with great care by the best artists of the time, and the difficulty in counterfeiting them [. . .] is a result of the perfection of the work.”72 Bemoaning the continued residence of the useful assignat-making equipment in the Archives Nationales at the Hôtel de Soubise, Anisson-Duperron explained how “charged with presenting models for the manufacture of passports, I think that one could successfully apply there the seals, borders, and vignettes that served formerly for the fabrication of assignats.”73 Napoleonic passports, with their cursive borders, stamps, and elaborate counterfoils, do indeed recall the visual language employed by assignats and, for the latter feature, mandats territoriaux, which were separated from a stub by being cut across an ornate border. It appears that AnissonDuperron never succeeded in his attempt to recycle the technologies remaindered in the archive, quite possibly because of the assignat’s still unstable political meaning and

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perceived material weaknesses. Nonetheless, implicit in his proposal was an understanding of assignats not as signifiers of financial disaster but rather as prototypes for the effective use of print media against the immoral and counterrevolutionary tendencies represented by counterfeiting. The war against counterfeiting and the attendant perfection of the assignat were invoked by Anisson-Duperron to suggest the potential incorruptibility and standardization of the passport. AnissonDuperron’s request may have been an attempt to validate retrospectively his father’s work in fabricating the assignat, but he also aimed to legitimize the passport by invoking the quality of artistic labor used to make paper money. Anisson-Duperron’s desire to reactivate the revolutionary archive was a retrospective visual linkage of passport and money that had in fact been made years previously via both objects’ arousal of anxieties concerning circulation. The circulation of assignats and passports were commonly linked in discourses on surveillance, and the possession or production of fake assignats was regularly associated with a failure to produce identity documents.74 The counterfeit note, whose circulation provoked such anxiety in the 1790s, featured as the

implied bodily counterpart to the unrestricted circulation of individuals—“the malevolent people who circulate in different parts of the Republic, and who incite the violation of the laws,” as the Convention, debating the passport issue, had described them seventeen years earlier.75 Furthermore, the taxonomical boundaries between the two objects were permeable, as assignats were, initially at least, “certificates” representing the ownership of nationalized land, while passports were value-bearing, receiving stamps on their travels that indicated the tariff paid for a particular voyage. It comes as little surprise to see Gatteaux’s central design for the four-hundred-livres assignat of 21 November 1792 (fig. 33) reproduced in a clumsy fashion as the letterhead and passport vignette for the département de la Nièvre (see fig. 3). The institutions responsible for the manufacture of administrative and identity documents were as accountable as any other to the shifting political demands of the day, although the political present of each institution was inevitably informed by its earlier history. The technology with which national identity documents were made was similarly politicized and, as the Revolution progressed, the materiality of

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passports was increasingly informed by the Revolution’s own past, as they intersected with other kinds of images with their own highly loaded histories.

Commemorating Citizenship Alongside these papers, revolutionary certification achieved its most explicitly propagandistic use in the form of documents given to prominent or virtuous citizens, to commemorate a heroic deed or involvement in another ideologically useful activity. Such certificates also marked individual presence at specific places and times, such as attendance at a festival. They were therefore overtly historical. Validating individuals’ anterior action as an endorsement of their present status, the certificates functioned as a kind of “honorific” portraiture, even though the descriptive information on such certificates was reduced, for the most part, to a series of signatures, avoiding the all-seeing eye of passport description. By avoiding the specificity of the individual physiognomy, these documents were able to lay claim to a sense of universality and timelessness that distinguished them from passports and other more temporary papers. The most immediate and significant bout of revolutionary certification followed the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, although later participatory events, such as civic oaths or attendance at the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, also required official recognition. After much initial celebration and the sporadic issuance of medals, in late July 1789 a committee comprising Bastille conquerors Dusaulx, Oudart, La Crosnière, Thuriot, La Grey, and Desmond finalized plans to compile a definitive inventory of all those involved in the attack on the prison.76 These vainqueurs were to be recognized officially and presented with certificates attesting to their participation. The certificates offered to the 863 official vainqueurs described in detail the events for which they were

to be recognized, with spaces remaining for the individual’s name, a variety of official signatures, and two seals (fig. 34). In addition, these individuals were allowed to add the title “Vainqueur de la Bastille” to their signatures and were provided with access to a range of merchandise, from signet rings in the shape of the Bastille to rifle slings engraved with their bearers’ names. The certification of the vainqueurs was thus compatible with the commercial exploitation of the prison, particularly by Pierre-François Palloy and his workers. In June 1790 Camus proposed to the National Assembly that vainqueurs be furnished with a distinct uniform by which they might be identified.77 The award of these documents and other paraphernalia both certified vainqueurs and accorded them a certifying agency. The names of the Bastille conquerors accumulated an intense rhetorical power, literally emblazoned across their chests, while their signatures and seals, markers of individual authorship, merged with shared Bastille symbolism to produce a new political creation easily recognized by all.78 Vainqueurs performed a socially stabilizing function, appearing at many revolutionary festivals, often at their own instigation. As Colin Lucas notes, their presence at large gatherings proved an effective means of breaking down large and potentially dangerous crowds into distinct, socially sanctified individuals. This process, Lucas claims, helped make the revolutionary crowd “safe.”79 Although the original point from which this social control developed was the violent overthrow of the Bastille, it is clear that vainqueurs were to be imagined as socially useful citizens, and that certification was crucial to this myth. Nonetheless, vainqueur status was also valuable for those who were politically active in less conventional ways. One Jean-Baptiste Poupart-Beaubourg, for instance, published a large poster at his own expense, appealing for information from anyone who could defend him against charges of counterfeiting assignats, for which he was imprisoned at la Force.80 Signing off as a vainqueur, Poupart-Beaubourg referenced repeatedly the destroyed prison,

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capitalizing its name throughout the text, and compared it to l’Abbaye, its alleged contemporary equivalent. Suggesting that it was in fact his captors who were responsible for the counterfeiting of which he was accused, Poupart-Beaubourg attempted to turn the transparent moral virtue and revolutionary agency associated with vainqueur status to his advantage. The certification of vainqueurs extended in some cases to former prisoners of the Bastille. Notable among these was

Figure 34 Nicolas [inv.] and Delettre [sculp.], Brevet du vainqueur de la Bastille, décerné en vertu du décret de l’Assemblée Nationale du 19 juin 1790 à Pierre Fillon. Liberté conquise le 14 juillet 1789, 1790. Etching and engraving. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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Figure 35 Antoine Vestier, Portrait de Latude, 1789, oil on canvas. Musée Carnavalet, Paris, P335. Photo: Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet

Henri Masers de Latude, an erstwhile prisoner whose case was taken up gleefully by revolutionaries in the absence of adequate recent captives. As only seven prisoners were found in the Bastille at the time of its invasion (four of whom were returned straight back to jail for counterfeiting), Latude, who had been imprisoned from 1749 to 1784 after a failed attempt to defraud the Marquise de Pompadour, was championed and immortalized in a portrait by Vestier (fig. 35), reproduced as an etching by the same artist. His crime had been to offer advance information of a conspiracy to poison the marquise, an intrigue he had manufactured himself to extort a reward. Capitalizing on popular fascination with the prison, Latude published in 1787 an exhaustive account of his time in the

Bastille, a tale of courage and suffering that glamorized his many escape attempts while playing down his initial crime. After July 1789 this book appeared in several reeditions and in a number of translations.81 Vestier’s portrait refers only to the 1756 lettre de cachet that had extended Latude’s detention, yet the presence of this document in the bottom right-hand corner of the image confirmed its status as a transformed kind of certificate—both repressive and honorific—that authenticated the sitter’s connection to the Bastille, which is shown being demolished by Palloy’s workers in the background. The homemade ladder with which Latude had tried to escape was exhibited by various impresarios, and Palloy included miniature versions of it in the tableaux that accompanied his traveling Bastille relics.82 Latude’s authorship of his own identity was inflected by a desire to avenge himself publicly on those responsible for his incarceration. Following the destruction of the statue of Louis XV on the Place de la Révolution in 1792, Latude requested and received the bronze right hand of the king, a sculptural remnant that stood in for the hand that had signed his arrest warrant.83 Appropriating the original act of royal certification, Latude negated it by his authorship of the fragment and by the fragmentation of the prison that symbolized the despotism for which he blamed his imprisonment. Relaying this anecdote, Louis-Sébastien Mercier observed how the material frailty of this statue and the political regime it represented were linked explicitly to the present shortage of metal currency: “The day we pulled down the statues of kings, I saw the multitude in a singular kind of astonishment at finding that all these bronzes were not massive, and that the flanks of the horse were scarcely thicker than a three livres piece; they could not get over this surprise, and as they had counted on an almost indefinite coinage of six liard pieces, they felt a kind of grief at being exposed to the truth. ‘What,’ they said, ‘was it so hollow?’ Yes, everything was hollow, both power and statue!”84

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In the year VIII (1799–1800), Latude proposed a means to dispose of the national debt by reintroducing assignats.85 As this debt had been incurred by the military defense of the French people, Latude considered it appropriate that the people assemble to issue notes bearing 5 percent interest in the name of a “departmental coalition.” Each department would, according to this plan, offer a certain amount of paper to be printed as notes, mapping the new administrative regions directly onto money and recalling the localized billets de confiance that had compensated for the shortage of assignats. Latude recognized the reiterative nature of this project, for “at the top of each sheet, there will be the imprint of a phoenix, holding scales in its beak” (6–7). Yet these notes were significantly different from the assignats destroyed in 1796, as Latude made clear in a detailed explanation of their formal characteristics. The seal of the department and the signature of the departmental president would be printed on each note. Below an imprint of the eponymous phoenix—a popular revolutionary motif—would be this legend: “Yes, without my help, France would have been exterminated. And to save it, I rise from my ashes” (7). Then followed the main text, listing the department that issued the note, followed by the following statement, to be filled in or deleted as applicable: “I undersigned, native of Paris, or of Metz, or of Agde, etc., grocer, or wholesaler, or farmer, resident in Paris, such a road, such a number, or in Lyon, or in Montaguac, I promise to pay to the bearer, in three months time, the sum of one hundred, or three, or five hundred francs,

etc.” (7–8). Following a signature and date, the president of the department, the president of the municipality, and the mayor of the town were to make similar promises to honor and recognize this promissory note, attended by their relevant seals. Latude claimed confidently that his paper notes would be “more solid than those of all the banks in the universe” (8). The wealth of personal and geographical information, authorizing stamps, dates, and signatures on Latude’s projected money, inserted in preconceived spaces in a pro forma text, resembles nothing so much as the revolutionary passport. Although the time and expense involved in such a project ensured that it was never taken seriously, like Anisson-Duperron’s later project, Latude’s scheme was a self-conscious reflection on the historically significant role of state-issued printed paper and on the relationship between stability and mobility. Formulating both group and individual identities, revolutionary passports and certificates showed how interactions between subjects and objects were essential to the formation of revolutionary citizenship and to the revolutionary public sphere more broadly. Despite their authoritative claims and their close relationship to the archival record, these documents were inconsistent sites of conflict and revision, presence and absence. Palimpsests where the idea of what it meant to be a revolutionary came in and out of focus—where it was, quite literally, “envisaged”—passports and certificates also provided a template against which the credentials of a range of other images might be tested, revised, and recycled.

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CHAPTER THREE

REVOLUTIONARY MODELS/ MODEL REVOLUTIONARIES ARCHITECTURE, PRINT, AND PARTICIPATION AT THE FESTIVAL OF THE FEDERATION

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A painting by Jean-Jacques Hauer represents the Marquis de Lafayette standing beneath a pantheon of marble busts representing Franklin, Désilles, Mirabeau, and Rousseau, who glower down on an unusual interior scene (fig. 36).1 At the table beside Lafayette, a woman, thought to be Madame Roland, is engaged in drawing an image of the 1791 Festival of the Federation, held to commemorate the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and the reunification of regional militias as the National Guard. Lafayette had played a key role in the first Paris festival in July 1790, leading an oath to be faithful to the nation, the law, and the king, and in fact Roland’s drawing is remarkably similar to the many printed images that circulated after the 1790 event, such as the version by Berthault (fig. 37). Hauer’s painting dramatizes neatly a problem at the heart of all festival and indeed much revolutionary representation: that the limited temporality and short-lived materiality of the event might fail to fix its place in memory. Despite the inevitable shortcomings of images— especially their inability to present but a single view of a multisensorial event—they were nevertheless crucial to the afterlife of revolutionary festivals, and Hauer’s work shows the Federation as an event constructed through its representations, emphasizing the importance of multiple aerial viewpoints and different, overlapping temporalities in this process.

Past Perfect The temporary nature of revolutionary festivals was such that from a modern perspective they are only knowable through their representations—or representations of their representations, such as Hauer’s image—offering a unique perspective on the relation between visual practice in two and three dimensions. Like both assignats and identity documents, revolutionary festivals were dependent on a mutable dialogue between a tangible object and its paper substitute, and they

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were equally subject to and productive of anxieties about provisional materiality. As with these documents, festivals were a volatile, contingent sign of participation in the body politic, for they were a space where individuals might interact directly with the state and be identified as “revolutionary” as a result. Festivals were, throughout the Revolution, among the most consistently employed means of visual propaganda, and as such it was essential that they were seen in some form by as many people as possible. This applied especially to the large, centralized Parisian festivals, which, although they had taken their lead from events in villages and towns across France, frequently aimed to provide a model for their provincial counterparts. Yet the myth of universal participation that festivals propagated should not be taken at face value. Indeed, a troubling distance often existed between the time-space of the festival and the revolutionary subjects for whom it was intended. Exacerbated by the transient character of the event, this experience of distance occurred shortly after or even coincident with the event of the festival, affecting those separated by geography or an obscured view. In his monumental Histoire de l’art pendant la Révolution, Jules Renouvier observed how “the most alive art of the Revolution [l’art le plus vivant] is in its festivals.”2 Certainly, revolutionary festivals brought together a wide range of artists, architects, manufacturers, set designers, and skilled artisans— many of whom would have been otherwise unemployed—to create innovative and densely choreographed participatory scenarios that condensed a variety of artistic forms. However, Renouvier’s “vivant” is strangely mournful, for the art of revolutionary festivals was produced in anticipation of its demise, its duration limited by the timescale of the festival within which it was contained. Despite the aspirations of successive legislatures, revolutionary festivals did not replace the annual repetition typified by the religious calendar until Robespierre’s attempt to formalize a festival calendar in his

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Figure 36 Jean-Jacques Hauer, General Lafayette and Mme. Roland Drawing a Plan for the Festival of Federation in 1791, 1791. Oil on canvas. Bequest of Henry C. Lewis, 1895.39, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor. Photo: University of Michigan Museum of Art

Figure 37 Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, Vue du Champ de Mars le 14 juillet 1790, 1790. Aquatint. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum

speech of 18 floréal year II (7 May 1794).3 Nonetheless, revolutionary festivals were materially cyclical, and parts of some of their structures survived their initial use to be remade in entirely new contexts, often looking quite different. This reuse of materials was familiar from the practices of the royal decorators of the Menus-Plaisirs and their production of scenery for a variety of prerevolutionary ceremonies, such as

royal entries, spectacles, and theatrical tableaux, from which revolutionary festivals inherited a great deal. The altar from the 1790 Festival of the Federation was recycled for the festival for the victims of Nancy in 1790 and the Federations of 1791 and 1792. Later, the sculpted lions at the Champ de Mars for the Festival of Victory on 10 prairial year IV (29 May 1796) appeared again at the funeral of Hoche on 10 vendémiaire year

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VI (1 October 1797), while the “mountain” dominating the Festival of the Supreme Being was redeployed for the Festival of Victory in 1794. The mountain, which was erected on the framework of the Federative altar, lasted relatively intact throughout year III but seems to have disappeared at some point in year IV. Torches at the cenotaph of Rousseau were the same as those placed around the statue of regeneration at the Festival of Reunion, while the funeral chariot designed by Cellerier for the Festival of the Swiss of Châteauvieux was seen again at several Panthéonisations.4 Equally, ritual spaces such as the Champ de Mars and the Panthéon were repeatedly reused as backdrops. Yet although the destruction, repainting, and recycling of the props and installations of revolutionary festivals were preordained, the possibility remained of a material reconstitution in which transient objects could be re-created and perpetuated through reproductive media. This simulated reality could potentially be more enduring than the objects, oaths, and events that comprised the festivals themselves. As Renouvier put it, defending the provisional character of festival architecture and staking a claim for the unique mnemonic role of vanished objects: “There are monuments other than those of stone and marble, and they will always be remembered, even though they lasted no longer than a decade.”5 Although Renouvier’s insightful account was published in 1863, the festivals of the French Revolution have experienced an effective rehabilitation only in the last forty years, as the incorporation of anthropological, sociological, and structuralist approaches into historical writing encouraged a reevaluation of the role of festivals in the formation of political and social identities.6 Despite a continual presence in canonical histories of the Revolution produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revolutionary festivals had suffered as a consequence of dominant political models of historical explanation that cast them as inconsequential or totalitarian Jacobin follies or, on the

other hand, celebrated them as precursors to later political developments in the twentieth century. Individual festivals were retrospectively selected in support of specific political ideologies and others denigrated as a result, a pattern not dissimilar to the revolutionaries’ revisions of their own ritual past. Only the Festival of the Federation, with many qualifications, survived unblemished as exemplary of a more innocent stage of the Revolution, uncorrupted by the Terror and the politics of individualism, its commemoration of the fall of the Bastille and its celebration of consensus repeated, starting in 1880, as a national holiday.7 Rather than attempt to provide an overarching account of revolutionary festivals, which were in any case far from homogenous, I want to take a different tack from the nowdominant Durkheimian model of revolutionary festivals proposed in Mona Ozouf ’s justly classic analysis, which focused on the ways that festivals might be considered united in expressing a fundamental social need for the religious, even when framed in a secular context.8 Instead, I want to return to the specific instance of the Festival of the Federation, primarily as it appeared in its paradigmatic form in Paris, to think about the ways in which images—especially printed images— were employed as a means of coming to terms with the vanished spectacle and fleeting materiality of the event. Of course, such images might be accounted for alongside Ozouf ’s compelling argument as an extension or effect of the faith structures developed by the festival itself. In other words, it could be put convincingly that these images of festivals are similarly involved in the production of a revolutionary belief system.9 Yet representations of festivals are interpretative mediations of a scene or objects, directed by one or more authors, and they are therefore subjective, dependent on ideology, circumstance, artistic intent, and complex forms of reception. They should not be substituted for the “real thing,” even though this was often the purpose their producers

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intended them to fulfill. Second, prints of festivals circulated in a market governed by consumers and by the production of images for profit, whereas the majority of revolutionary festivals, at least those represented in print, involved some form of legislative input in terms of subsidy and control.10 Because of this last difference, image-makers were accorded a degree of freedom in their interpretation of revolutionary events, which puts them at a subtle distance from the festivals themselves and makes any argument for equivalence between the two problematic.11 Consequently, representations of festivals encourage us to think about the reliability of images in furnishing evidence of expired objects and events. The conflation of image and event that pervades much writing about these prints reproduces revolutionary print-entrepreneurs’ rhetoric about themselves, which generally claimed to present in as truthful a form as possible the events that occurred. The following addendum, attached to a “historical” 1790 account of the Festival of the Federation, is typical and extends to claims made for the printed image: “I will point out to my readers that it is hardly possible that they could have more accurate details. I did not leave the Champ de Mars from five o’clock in the morning until seven o’clock in the evening, and I went everywhere. As for the exterior details, they are no less certain.”12 In our desire to recuperate a picture of the past, we are often blind to the exaggerations, tricks, and subtleties presented to us by the ostensibly topographical or “documentary” image. The wholesale assimilation of image and content threatens to deny the specific autonomy and variety of festival images, simplifying their complex connections with their subjects and diminishing their role in the construction of the festivals’ reputations. As an event (or, more properly, a process) that required both movement and inertia at appropriate times to function properly, the relationship between the solid and the transient in festival culture was complicated, finding an

uneasy sort of resolution in the image.13 This tension was exacerbated by the ability of print to represent, even mimic, sculptural or architectural forms. Consequently, in this chapter I aim to investigate the relationship between images in festivals and images of festivals. At stake here is not only material and political authenticity but the authenticity of representation itself, for festival prints have much to tell us about revolutionary spectatorship and approaches to images.

Constructing the Myth The first Festival of the Federation in Paris was, famously, made by the people, a fact that did much to cement its inviolable reputation. Of all the festivals of the French Revolution, this ceremony, held on and around 14 July 1790, is the most mythologized, the most represented, and, we are led to believe, the least complicated. “The prestige of the Federation,” remarks Ozouf, was to make it “the least disputed episode of the French Revolution.”14 Moreover, as Maurice Lambert intimated in 1890, “of all the legends of the Revolution that of the Federation is perhaps the most true.”15 Contemporary reports of the events were—apart from anomalies such as Camille Desmoulins’s account of the “monotonous spectacle” of the procession, the “organized boredom” later identified by Jean Davallon—largely unanimous in their praise, and a language of exaggeration and fabrication embellishes the majority of descriptions, verbal and visual.16 “A national festival is being prepared [. . .] as majestic as the most imposing spectacle given in the whole world,” wrote one author with characteristic hyperbole.17 Echoes of this type of rhetoric were heard years later in subsequent festivals, in different political contexts.18 The appeal to posterity, nature, and the universal is repeated many times in the abundant printed pamphlets and descriptions that circulated shortly after the events in Paris. For example, we read how “future revolutionary models | 75

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races will be astonished that a people, bowed for nearly eighteen centuries under the chains of the most shameful slavery, have given a spectacle of regeneration to the universe.”19 The Festival of the Federation was rapidly invoked as a kind of revolutionary “conscience” against which other events could be judged.20 The unanimity of historiography, both during and after the Revolution, is striking, and it is particular to the Festival of the Federation, which promoted a myth of consensus and the completion of the Revolution, and came to be imagined in mythic terms itself. The many images depicting the fabrication of the Federation by the people of Paris provide clues to this particular fiction, although their full meaning is only apparent in the light of later works. Jean-Louis Prieur’s Fédération générale faite à Paris le 14 juillet 1790 (fig. 38) inherits from the vue d’optique tradition of perspective representations of scenes and events a concern with the totality of the event depicted.21 The image, published in the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, is a high-end example of one of many similar representations that appeared in the days, months, and—such was the symbolic charge generated by the Federation—years after the festival itself. The image shows us a large, decorated triumphal arch that dominates the left-hand center of the image, its three Romanesque portals casting dramatic shadows into the foreground.22 This colossal structure has an open terrace on its roof, peopled with tiny figures seen from behind, many of whom are brandishing umbrellas. The festival witnessed distinctly unseasonal weather and much of the procession was drenched in rain, threatening the survival of the freshly painted festival architecture and ruining the fireworks. The densely packed audience in this print extends to either side of the arch, continuing beyond the boundaries of the frame to form a wide arena where an altar, plumed with incense, partly obscures the form of Ange-Jacques Gabriel’s Military Academy at the vanishing point. In the immediate foreground a path or bridge leads from the arch to

the viewer, whose perspective is elevated. The space is filled with groups of figures, some arranged in serried lines, others engaged in more informal modes of sociability. Many are taking oaths, their arms raised in salute. To the right, puffs of smoke suggest the salvo of cannon fire that announced the moment of the oath, an action that was repeated in relay all around France, in a militaristic emulation of the traditional role of church bells in the circulation of information.23 Every figure, every eye focuses on the action in the distance. Some climb to the roof of a small sentry house to see above the heads of the crowd, while others appear to be running toward the arena to get a better view. Berthault’s engraving of Prieur’s drawing depicts the Festival of the Federation at its climax: the mass swearing of an oath to defend the Fatherland on Joseph-Jacques Ramée’s trompe l’oeil marble-painted autel de la patrie in the center of the freshly constructed arena on the Champ de Mars. The moment of the oath saw the clouds break and transfiguring sunlight pour in, a prominent feature of many contemporary images. This is seen from behind Jacques Cellerier’s triumphal arch, a wooden frame covered with painted canvas, decorated with slogans and an illusionistic bas-relief frieze design by the sculptor Jean-Guillaume Moitte.24 The print forms a parallel (conscious, no doubt) with an earlier plate in the series, representing Besenval’s troops leaving the Champ de Mars nearly one year earlier, on 12 July 1789, to suppress the insurrection on the Place Louis XV (fig. 39).25 The difference between the two scenes is striking, and it seems likely that the comparison was intended to mark the distinction between Ancien-Régime and revolutionary uses of the same space, the exodus of troops in front of a meager and hostile audience in tableau 9 contrasted with the massive influx of humanity and the full participation of the crowd in tableau 39. The allusion is unambiguous: as one regime departs the heroic stage, so another enters, a transitory metaphor appropriate to the Federation’s unique status as both the last royal and the first revolutionary festival. Most prominently, an

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Figure 38 Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculp.], Fédération générale faite à Paris le 14 juillet 1790, plate 39 from Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, 1791–1794. Etching and engraving. Rare Books and Special Collections, Napoleon Collection, DC148 C65 1804 elf, McGill University Library, Montreal. Photo: Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal Figure 39 Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculp.], Les troupes du Champ de Mars partant pour la place Louis XV le 12 juillet 1789, plate 9 from Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, 1791–1794. Etching and engraving. Rare Books and Special Collections, Napoleon Collection, DC148 C65 1804 elf, McGill University Library, Montreal. Photo: Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal

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antithetical use of architecture establishes this conflict in meaning. The troops leave the arena through a paltry iron gate, whereas the thirty-foot-high Federative arch that dominates Prieur’s image accommodates the revolutionary oath in truly heroic, massive fashion, marking out a suitably transformative space. In the image it matters little that the solidity of the arch is illusory, for the effect is convincing.26 Certainly, Alain-Charles Gruber’s claim that “the descriptions and illustrations of this ceremony are innumerable, but many have the fault of putting the emphasis on the political meaning of the festival of Federation and neglecting its architectural aspect” appears misguided when read against these images, an aesthetic depoliticization of revolutionary art practice that chimes with attempts elsewhere to “exorcize” the Revolution.27 On the contrary, it appears that Prieur and many of his contemporaries in fact accentuated the architectural setting of the festival and did so because, as the stage for the Revolution’s first proper commemoration, it was itself overtly political. The images in the Tableaux historiques were, although startlingly detailed, not quite as “exceptionally precise” as Claudette Hould has claimed, for they frequently exaggerated architectural scale.28 As Richard Etlin explains, this was not limited to a single architectural feature, for “as with the depictions of the triumphal arch, contemporary visualizations of the altar varied significantly.” However, “each appears to transform the true size of the object and the relationship of the people on and about it at the moment of the oath.”29 The festival structures were only meaningful in the context of their creation and use within the restricted circumstances of the Federation, a site- and time-specificity ensured by the ephemerality of both the event and its decoration. Even though the altar and the arch (or parts of them) survived in an altered form for some time, they acquired after the Federation the status of unpreservable revolutionary relics—present only in reproduction—whose meaning was conditioned by their

first use. Barère’s wish that with the Federation “everything in France must be new and we should date everything from today” acquired a material expression.30 Yet dream as the anonymous author of Songe patriotique ou le monument et la fête might, the structures of the Federation were not to be precursors of permanent monuments in bronze and marble.31 Revolutionary memory was at stake in these objects, but it was produced through the impending absence of the object rather than its preservation, as the shortage of time and materials meant that more grandiose gestures were impossible. In fact, both the temporary object and the reproductive print were particularly suited to the production of memory, in that the former materially embodied forgetting and the passing of time, while the latter mobilized the printed trace as a marker of absence and recall. In the context of the Federation, the transience of the festival architecture engendered a concentration on its materiality that was also inflected by a desire to deflect accusations of dissimulation and that celebrated the festival’s contradictory origins in popular participation, thus mythologizing the festival and providing a suitable template for subsequent festive practice. The idea of a Federative festival had been suggested almost from the moment of the storming of the Bastille, gathering momentum over the months following the winter of 1789. On 11 June 1790 a proposal for a national Federation, in emulation of provincial festivals that had been springing up all over the country, was presented to the king. The next day a committee, headed by Jean-Sylvain Bailly, the mayor of Paris, and including six delegates from the 120 nominated by the districts, began the onerous task of its organization.32 The festival was to be restricted to a military procession and oath, and suggestions of a civic or municipal component to the event were quickly rebuffed.33 The reasons for this constraint indicate possible motivations for the subsequent desire to perpetuate the Federation, and by extension the Revolution itself, in print: the

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Federation was organized against a pervasive background of insurrection dominated by a fear of counterrevolution and disorganized militias. The very word Fédération achieved its newfound significance as protection against what Lambert termed “universal decomposition.”34 In the weeks prior to the ceremony, reports of a counterrevolutionary plot against the Federation were rife; rumors of an alleged attempt by aristocratic conspirators to release the wild animals lodged in the ménagerie bordering the Champ de Mars provoked a response from the nervous Parisian police.35 By unifying the small and potentially dangerous regional militias under the centralized rubric of the National Guard, it was hoped that the Revolution would be consolidated and that such dangers would be averted. As Talleyrand, the bishop of Autun, who was to administer the Parisian oath, observed: “This festival [. . .] in making perceptible to all eyes the patriotism that animates the French, will finally persuade the enemies of the Revolution that it still exists, and that the effort they make to destroy it will be in vain.”36 As this statement clearly demonstrates, “ephemerality” was a political problem that affected the whole revolutionary process, an obstacle with which the Revolution’s ritual forms would, irrespective of their materiality, have to engage. The committee charged with the organization of the Federation was forced to think quickly about what form the festival should take. The festivals of the Ancien Régime and those of antiquity provided the most immediate models, although all involved were keen to avoid the associations of popular violence, sexual license, and dissimulation that accompanied the annual carnival and the excessive expense and regularity of the religious festival calendar. In fact, these precedents had been attacked by those with divergent political and intellectual affiliations throughout the preceding century.37 Royal spectacle was hardly the best archetype, either. At the celebrations following the marriage of the dauphin to Marie-Antoinette in 1770, a rocket from a firework display

was discharged directly into the crowd, causing a panic. Many sightseers were pushed into the river and drowned, while others were crushed underfoot. Nonetheless, a tradition of royal entrées, firework displays, and their attendant structures provided a material typology for the revolutionary festival and its representation. Yet despite evident similarities, revolutionary festivals were distinct from these events, not just by dint of their novel iconography but for their quite different political and social context and because the relationship between the festival and the event it commemorated had shifted so radically with the Revolution. Four sites were suggested for the event: the Champ de Mars, the Plaine des Sablons, and the plains of Grenelle and Saint-Denis, all on the outskirts of Paris.38 Despite the greater size of the Plaine des Sablons, the Champ de Mars, an empty space in front of the Military Academy, bordering the western reaches of the Seine near the village of Passy, was finally chosen, largely for its associations with both Roman and, in its use by Charlemagne, earlier French precedents. Competition for the reconstruction of the Champ de Mars as a Federative arena was fierce, and architects Blondel, Cellerier, Giraud, de Mouillefarine, de Pâris, Poyet, Mandart, and Sobre all submitted proposals.39 As Odile Ramette points out, the Federation should be considered a collective project, the collaborative realization of these diverse schemes.40 This is in keeping with the position advanced by the committee, for in an attempt to pacify warring artists and to diffuse charges of plagiarism it was claimed that “the plan that they arrived at was, so to speak, a result of the ideas that they drew from all the plans that had been put before them.”41 This happy union was more in keeping with the rhetoric of Federative cooperation than historical fact, and artistic control was largely ceded to Cellerier. Nevertheless, at the level of the festival’s actual construction, not to mention its effect, combining architecture, liturgy, procession, flags, broadsheets, sculpture, and revolutionary models | 79

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song, this appraisal of its collaborative character was largely correct. Furthermore, this multiplicity in conception was reflected in the diversity and simultaneity that later characterized the festival’s representation. Cellerier’s plan involved remodeling the Champ de Mars into an elliptical arena that would accommodate up to three hundred thousand spectators. At one end of this vast empty space, the Military Academy provided the backdrop for a cloth-covered tribunal adorned with fleurs-de-lys, to seat the royal family and members of the National Assembly. At the other end of the field the triumphal arch would flank the Seine, where a temporary pontoon bridge would be constructed to accommodate the procession from Passy, on the opposite side of the river. In the center of the arena, the twenty-five-foot-high circular altar was set atop a square base with a series of steps on each side, in turn placed atop a set of circular steps that ran the whole way around the structure. This was to be the centerpiece of the Federative oath and had to be large and sturdy enough to take the weight of several hundred officiating soldiers and priests. The work of forming the terraces around the Champ de Mars was allocated to workers in the Parisian ateliers de charité, while the construction of the festival structures was divided into sixty parts, roles that were to be shared among the painters, masons, carpenters, and builders of each district. The ateliers drew their labor force from the unemployed of Paris and were the outcome of the declaration of 4 August 1789 that had attempted to repatriate all homeless Parisians to their pays of origin or provide compulsory work for those who refused to comply. From 21 June 1790, for twenty sols a day, these workers reshaped the ground on the Champ de Mars. Numbers rose from four thousand to ten thousand, nearly all the workers available from the ateliers, and pay was increased to thirty sols to encourage productivity, while many were persuaded to work through the night.42 Despite these entreaties, work fell

behind schedule, and the whole operation reached a crisis point following a strike over long hours by the laborers from the ateliers. On 30 June 1790 a letter, written by a soldier named Carthéri, appeared in the Chronique de Paris, urging members of the army to aid the construction of the Champ de Mars.43 The idea proved popular, and whole battalions volunteered. Despite concern over security, by 8 July approximately three hundred thousand Parisians, about half the population of the city, had joined the soldiers and the skilled artisans from the sections who were responsible for building the festival structures, in what swiftly became romanticized as the journée des brouettes (day of the wheelbarrows). The many representations of this vast building site and its varied cast of characters are the first images relating to the revolutionary festival, and they constitute a unique, unrepeated category among festival images. The few images representing other festivals during their construction or shortly before they took place, such as Michel’s sketch of the mountain erected for the Festival of the Supreme Being, were for the most part drawings confined to a limited audience.44 On the contrary, images of the preliminaries for the Federation were reproduced in large quantities at various qualities and became an integral component of the paradigmatic narrative of the festival. In the days following the festival and the bals illuminés and ������������������������������������������ aerostatic demonstrations that continued for several days on the Champ de Mars and the ruins of the Bastille, images of the Federative celebrations, including the preparations, flooded the print shops of Paris in the environs of the rue Saint-Jacques.

The Federation’s See-Through Structures Revolutionary Paris offered unprecedented opportunity for printmakers flexible enough to adapt to a market determined by political discourse. In the early years of the Revolution,

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Figure 40 Étienne Béricourt, Divertissement pendant les travaux préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération, ca. 1790. Ink drawing with gouache on paper. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1989.90. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/Domaine de Vizille

printed representations of the “stages” of the festival appeared in multiple media of widely divergent quality and price, as many artists turned their hand to producing historical scenes of the Revolution in progress. Certainly, the iconography of the preparations—which accentuated the mixing of social classes and was often described, as in Étienne Béricourt’s gouache (fig. 40), in a ribald visual language derived from the topsy-turvy world of the carnival—marked these images out as specifically festive and demonstrably more inclusive than the military exclusivity of the procession and oath.45 Consequently, such images often represent scenes of sociability and consumption, formalized in later rituals as the repas fraternel, or civic meal. The journée des brouettes, alongside the post-Federation dancing at the ruins of the Bastille on 15 and 16 July, appeared as festivals of a more “traditional” bent, punctuated by the somewhat austere demonstration of fraternity that characterized the festival “proper.” Restif de la Bretonne recounted a more typical festive incident on the night of 13 July, when he was mugged at the Champ de Mars by a group of young men, among whom he identified an engraver.46 One image from a contemporary almanac illustrates the collaborative nature of the construction, the effort of many

carpenters, painters, and other skilled artisan-entrepreneurs (fig. 41). In the words of a dedication to a lyric poem in honor of Bailly, this was “a moment when artists of all genres deployed their talents at every possible opportunity to consecrate the sublime and touching ceremony of the Confederation.”47 Significantly, the author included within his description of the effects of the festival the wider body of festival imagery, images that “multiply this festival from a thousand different aspects” and “allow a young author, profoundly affected, to see the whole of France.”48 Concentrating on the Federative arch in mid-construction—the scaffolded superstructure is clearly visible—this image demonstrates a willingness among Parisian printmakers to represent the ephemerality of the festival structures. The incompletion of the arch denotes the context of its construction; by representing it in medias res, the image affirms the agency and fraternal effort of the Parisian volunteers, consolidating the unique status of the Federation. Yet it simultaneously deconstructs the monumental allusions of the arch and its pretense at material and political solidity. Brongniart’s description of the scene of the journée des brouettes as ��������� resembling an antique bas-relief perhaps derives from a desire to

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Figure 41 Les travaux du Champ de Mars, from Almanach de la Fédération de France, 1791. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 42 Vue des travaux du Champ de Mars par les parisiens, l’an 1er de la liberté le 12 juillet 1790, 1790. Etching and engraving. Prints of the French Revolution Collection, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, P980009. Photo: The Getty Research Institute

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reinscribe some of the associative weight denied by the representation of the arch’s humble materiality, the heroic actions of citizens compensating for the disappointing artificiality of the trompe l’oeil bas-reliefs that adorned Cellerier’s structure.49 In a similar manner, an engraving titled Vue des travaux du Champ de Mars . . . le 12 juillet 1790 (fig. 42) allows the spectator to see right under and through the Federative altar, which at this point appears uncannily like a scaffold, put in place for an execution. The tumbrils filled with priests and aristocrats and the raised adzes of the laborers accentuate this perception, for like Béricourt’s image, which also exposes the skeleton of the altar, the image retains, alongside the public

allegations of fraternity, simmering intimations of carnivalesque violence. This ambiguous sense of conflict is embodied in a central detail of the exposed buttocks of a young woman falling into the mud from a wheelbarrow, the social tension compounded by the representation of well-dressed figures leisurely mounting the steps to the left-hand side of the image, oblivious to a team of citizens laboring alongside, and by a ubiquitous vainqueur in “Roman” costume. As with Béricourt’s image, in this engraving the artist makes satirical capital from the word brouette, which may variously signify a sexual position, drunkenness, and trickery, a set of sexual and libertine associations that slyly undercut the festival’s rhetoric of “innocent” union.50 One version of this print, published by revolutionary models | 83

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Gentot, lists the social constitution of the ten thousand people supposedly involved in this patriotic enterprise. They included: “Women, girls, monks, market women, the Swiss, artists, the National Guard. Our brothers the deputies of the Federative Pact, all the trade associations, the inhabitants of villages located seven leagues from Paris, the colleges, the King’s household, and finally, the princes.” Despite this apparent diversity, for every outpouring of civic solidarity contained within this prefestival “festival,” there were dissenting voices, and all involved appeared eager to mark out their territory. During the hurried preparations, it was noted how professional categories were demarcated by banners proclaiming loyalty to the principles of the Revolution, the carrying of which expressed a professional pride upon behalf of the bearers. Among the other trades, one commentator was compelled to recall the actions of the printers, who “had written on their banner: Printing, first torch of liberty; those of M. Prudhomme had hats of the same paper as that which covers the Révolutions; their legend was: Révolutions de Paris.”51 This droll piece of advertisement on behalf of the publisher Prudhomme gives an early indication of the self-referentiality that was soon to characterize printed representations of the festival. Representations of the construction of the Champ de Mars eagerly dramatized the nascent social conflict of the Revolution, a process in which the king, too, was implicated, and several prints implausibly represent the monarch toiling with a pick on the Champ de Mars. For Lynn Hunt, these images, such as the frontispiece to number thirty-six of the Révolutions de France et de Brabant, expressed the struggle to reform France’s political system, representing the king as an equal participant in this process.52 There is certainly a distinctly libidinal aspect to this imagery— the penetrative and fertile implications of the father of the people sowing his seed reiterated the message of images that represented Louis as a gardener tending the ploughshare,

distributed in the time leading up to his marriage to MarieAntoinette.53 Although such images were clearly propagandistic, for the king was an unwilling participant in the Federation, they suggest that such figures remained necessary to revolutionary self-definition. This was embellished in prints such as these, which eagerly played up the ironies of welldressed gentlemen and ladies knee-deep in mud pushing wheelbarrows, and which offset the abiding sense of consensus summed up by the revolutionary anthem “ah! ça ira” (ah! everything will be fine), which made its first appearance during the construction of the Champ de Mars.54 Prints of the preparations for the Federation engage a comic tradition that is all but lacking in images of the main event, apart from occasional caricatures of a grotesque clergy and aristocracy at the margins of the festival or licentious images such as the print titled crudely La Con-fédération nationale, which explicitly ridiculed the Federation’s “regenerative” pretensions by invoking sexual imagery. The subject of the journée des brouettes encouraged a certain visual dialogue and productive open-endedness specific to an event that inaugurated a new era of revolutionary history. For the audience of prints of the preparations, however, it was essential that they be distanced from the dissimulation that attended traditional festivals. Revolutionary festivals, from the Federation onward, were structured around legislative interdiction against the wearing of masks and other deceptive practices.55 Police regulations for the day of the festival required that all hoteliers submit lists of residents, while the desire to prevent counterrevolutionary sedition inspired prohibitions against the invitation of strangers into one’s home and ensured the suspension of all traffic in large parts of the capital.56 Eager to prevent a repeat of the scenes witnessed at Lille, where seven spectators had drowned in the swollen river Deûle, Parisian police and civic authorities strictly regulated security at the festival, and everyday circulation was effectively

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arrested in favor of its ritual form.57 Dissimulation and travestie, exemplified by the case of Louise Dollet, an eighteenyear-old girl arrested for attending the Federation dressed as a captain of the National Guard, were not to be tolerated.58 How, then, could festival organizers justify the artifice of the arch and the altar being treated as fundamental attributes of the festival’s sacred space? How, too, were printmakers to accommodate this falsehood with the appropriate degree of monumentality? Later festivals concentrated the problems posed by artificiality and repetition, for both simulacra and mime “involved mock figures made necessary by the absence of the event or individuals represented. They therefore involved deception for Rousseauist sensibilities that already suspected an element of betrayal in any kind of duplication.”59 Remaining, as in Michelet’s eulogy, “like a wonderful dream,” the Festival of the Federation swiftly took refuge in historical representation.60 “It passed like a dream,” Restif de la Bretonne recalled wistfully.61 The euphoric, utopian character of the day was not derived from the events of the festival alone but was produced by the manner of the festival’s organization and the sheer scale of the administrative constraints that surrounded it. In addition, among the transient effects that constituted the mise-en-scène of the Festival of the Federation, we should consider the crowd that dominated its subsequent representation, taking the Federative oath; celebrating at the Bastille, where greenery adorned yet another temporary wooden framework (see fig. 55); and articulating the passage through festive space. The crowd also aimed at transparency and was the ultimate sign of the unity and allegiance that the festival represented. Hunt argues that images of the Federation demonstrate the degree to which the traditional familial structures of royalty had been superseded, for prints depicting the festival showed “virtually atomistic individuals linked to the nation through their oaths rather than by their families or other particular ties.”62 Images of the construction of the

Champ de Mars prefigured and in many ways created this national consensus; it was not enough that the people unite to build the arena—they had to be shown to be doing so. The representation of the preemptive “festival” of the journée des brouettes was a necessary component in the visual assemblage of the festival’s mythology. Recalling a time of untroubled simplicity and transparent fidelity, it justified the equivocal meaning of the Federation’s material construction. Images of the people building the Champ de Mars and its transient decorations bring together and account for competing anxieties and desires: the need for transparency and momentum on the one hand and a simultaneous craving for solidity and permanence on the other. They also provided a bridge between the Federation’s genesis in popular participation and its conclusion in militarized state ritual. Inevitably, the significance of representations concerning the fabrication of the ephemeral structures of the festival extended beyond documentation of the journée des brouettes to a metaphysical interpretation of its material characteristics. The demystification of the buildup to the spectacle in printed images indicates, I suggest, a paradoxical attempt to accentuate the theatrical qualities of the festival effects in order to prevent a confusion of the signs of the real with the real itself. In an article published in 1790 titled “The Truth Without Make-up,” a carpenter by the name of Lanoa appealed for payment for work carried out during the Federation. Reaffirming the heroic actions of the professional builders of the Federation in the face of shadowy aristocratic enemies, Lanoa claimed that “our work overcame the multiplied obstacles and the redoubled efforts of the secret agents of the aristocracy.”63 By invoking the “make-up” with which he himself had adorned the festival but that threatened its survival, Lanoa turned the artifice of the festival against itself and remarked on the potential equivalence between the facture of the festival and the dissembling of those who desired its ruin. We may read Lanoa’s revolutionary models | 85

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request as a further attempt to render the Federation transparent, a position that representations of its fabrication also try to realize in order that the faux-solidity of the festival and its structures should be absolved from criticism. Lanoa’s heroicization of the carpenters’ work chimes with contemporary reports, legislative and nonofficial, that dwelt heavily upon the material appearance of a festival whose decoration was “unique in history, and that will surpass even more brilliantly, without doubt, all that Greece, Rome and Palmyra ever imagined.”64 This appeal to the future by reference to an idealized ancient past is repeated countless times. We read that “of all the monuments elevated by men, in memory of a remarkable time, or for the celebration of a festival, we have never seen anything as majestic and as imposing as the triumphal arch serving as a portico to the Champ de Mars and the altar of the Fatherland, constructed in the middle of this enclosure,” while the author of a poem honoring the Federation claimed that “the beautiful days of Rome and Athens” were reproduced in the arena.65 Unlike antique ceremonies, however, in the revolutionary festival the “obelisks and pyramids” no longer signified vain pride or tyranny, as “monuments of timid slaves, raised by a people in mourning.”66 The representation of the festival may be considered a collaborative attempt to preserve its ideal, monumental qualities. For Freud, the recognition that a revered object is transient and will ultimately be no longer engenders a state of mourning in which the libido attaches itself to the departed or departing object in anticipation of its actual demise. With the extinction of the object or even the recognition of its future decomposition, we are inclined to cling fervently to that which remains, in particular common attributes such as national pride. Transience and identity are, in Freud’s model, intrinsically linked. The transient object does not lose its value, for those mourning it are unwilling to renounce it and move toward a substitute until this phase has been com-

pleted.67 In a similar way, the Federative image prolonged the festival and all that it suggested, long after the end of its actual lifespan. Furthermore, the transient nature of the Federative decorations and the disappointing knowledge of their inevitable disappearance may have been partially ameliorated by the depiction of their ephemeral status, which recognized self-consciously their demolition in advance. Indeed, at one level the festival remained perfect only through destruction, scarcity value in time intensifying its symbolic value, a process heightened by the absence of any props that could deceive the future. The monuments of the past, elevated by a people in mourning, were transformed, in the revolutionary festival, into monuments capable of elevating a people, but this came at an inevitable cost to their materiality. They operated, in a sense, as “anti-monuments,” working against the idea of the monument itself, even as they participated fully in its codes. Fantasies of political cohesion that obscured the reality of social division, the incompletion of these structures is perhaps also indicative of a collective inability to avoid dealing head-on with the radical challenge the Revolution had posed to the concept of the monument itself.

Revolution from Above The surest, and often the only, way by which a crowd can preserve itself lies in the existence of a second crowd to which it is related [. . .] the sight, or simply the powerful image, of the second crowd, prevents the disintegration of the first.68 Representations of the Festival of the Federation were in 1790, alongside images of the storming of the Bastille, the most popular subject for printed images of a narrative nature.69 A prospectus for a large print of the Federation, designed by Dugourc and printed at Didot le jeune, explained the popularity of this subject in print, whose ability to circulate

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Figure 43 Hubert Robert, Fête de la Fédération au Champ de Mars, 1790. Oil on canvas. Château de Versailles et de Trianon, Versailles. Photo: RMN/Gérard Blot

information was considered especially suitable for this topic: “Painting will hasten, without doubt, to immortalize this memorable event; but printing alone has the precious advantage of multiplying enough that all men can enjoy it.”70 Some time after the event, paintings of the Federation did appear, such as Thévenin’s version of 1795, whose unusual diagonal perspective from the Military Academy end of the arena may have been adapted from printed images of the scene, such as that by Monnet and Helman. Other artists, such as Pierre-Antoine Demachy and Hubert Robert, conceived more original representations but in idioms derived from their prerevolutionary specialisms. Robert contributed a representation of the Federative arena that depicted Cellerier’s arch as an archaic, foliage-covered monument, even while the Federation itself was shown taking place all around it. Denying the flimsy

nature of the arch and collapsing multiple temporalities in the same image, Robert depicted the structure on its way to an ideal, slow-paced obsolescence that, in reality, would be far more swiftly accomplished (fig. 43). Cross-media influence went both ways, as according to the author of the above prospectus, the size of the print—three feet by two feet, larger than many paintings—was necessary “to render with precision the multiplicity of details, the vastness of the place, and even more for responding to the majesty of the subject.”71 The print was sold for one louis�������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������� to French customers and a more expensive thirty-six livres to foreigners, indicating the wide European spread of these images, while Dugourc, an artist famous for his playing-card designs, boasted that he could produce the image within the year, rather than the two it would normally take to design and print an image of this size.72

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For customers who required even more detail of the Federation, Didot aimed to publish and sell, for nine livres, a supplementary quarto volume containing the following: engravings of the plans, elevations, and details of the festival decoration; a transcript of the procès-verbal of the ceremony; a list of leaders of the National Assembly, up to and including 14 July; a list of Representatives; a table of deputies to the Federation, their names, positions, and qualities in order of department; and, finally, the names of the deputies from the army and other related bodies. Like Palloy’s wooden box under the Place de la Bastille, with which I began this book, this print functioned as an archive of revolutionary history, albeit one fixated on a specific moment in time. Subscribers to the print whose names were found among the lists of participants in the festival would receive an asterisk next to their names in the volume. This device clearly linked the image to the accompanying information, including the owner of the print in the symbolic community of the Federation by their projected co-ownership of the same commodity as the chosen representatives and witnesses of this paradigmatic political and social event.73 Chief among the enticements to buyers of such prints was a wealth of detail, a multiplicity of viewpoints that encompassed the many different site-specific appraisals of the festival. This was often described as a task that threatened to elude representation. “It is impossible to give an accurate idea of the superb perspective that appears to me from the top of the amphitheater where I am placed,” wrote one onlooker.74 Yet despite the difficulty in rendering a single image of the Federation, the manifold, constantly shifting scenario was inherently seductive: “It is impossible not to return to the multiple scenes offered by the changing picture [tableau mouvant] of the Champ de Mars,” rhapsodized another witness to the festival.75 Allegories relating to the Federation, such as that advertised on the front page of Le Moniteur three days after the festival, could be speedily reworked from preexisting models, avoiding the need

for any direct reference while effecting a facade of contemporaneity.76 Prints such as La nation française assistée par M. De Lafayette terrasse le despotisme (fig. 44) involved appropriate references to soldiers, an altar, and Lafayette, while giving little indication that the image resulted from direct observation. Allegorical images of this kind also helped promote a universalizing reading of the festival that promised to transcend its temporal limitations. Nevertheless, the largest market was for the topographical or historical print—the self-proclaimed eyewitness account. In a footnote to another written description of the festival, complete with map, the author is exonerated for his inability to provide a totalizing narrative, rendered impossible by the site-specificity and immediacy of his transcription. In this literary appropriation of a “popular” experience, the editor admitted that “there must be many repetitions and oversights in this little work, which was made very hurriedly, and which was not intended for printing, but the needs of the author do not let him take his time, and he can say with Gresset that he is too busy to correct.”77 Likewise, printed images of the festival, although often of a high quality, prized a certain spectatorial pretension in the artist above all other effects, although it is likely that many artists did indeed attend the ceremony. Contrasting with the focus on key events seen in works such as La nation française, most of these prints attempted a sweeping aerial perspective intended to give a sense of the whole, although in many cases, particularly more basic prints, the size of the crowd had to be reduced in order for details to be visible. Formally, images of the Federative procession and oaths drew from a wide variety of sources and printmaking experiences, a heterogeneous influx of material that nevertheless yielded surprisingly similar outcomes. Standardization, the consequence of piracy in emulation of successful market forms and the desire to present a unified idea of commemoration, resulted in many images of the Federation appearing, at first glance, similar. These images are, in effect, commemorations of a commemoration, and as Ozouf writes regarding the 1989

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bicentennial, “every commemoration draws its life from the obsessive affirmation of sameness.”78 Yet these images, though often apparently alike and generally bearing a spare, descriptive title, should not be considered in the singular. Furthermore, they cannot be assigned a static position in the artistic hierarchy, their variance in quality, price, and media undermining their apparent similarities. Printed representations of the Festival of the Federation in fact accentuate and encourage multiplicity, presenting it from every conceivable angle; we see the festival from either side (fig. 45), either end (fig. 46), diagonally, above, in ground-plan and from a variety of degrees of elevation. However, while each image is monolithic in itself, viewed as a corpus they create a narrative from a number of stationary instants. Individually each work presents relatively little action beyond the event represented. Together, in the context of their reproduction and circulation, they function almost “cinematically,” offering an image of simultaneity by which a viewer might understand the movement, diverse roles, and multiple viewpoints necessary to the festival. By creating the effect that each image is at once similar yet perceptibly different, viewers were encouraged to piece together a composite narrative that itself operates as a loose metaphor for the unification of the National Federation from different regional Federations. This accretion of images allowed for the visual preservation of the most transient yet most important feature of the festival: the mobile spectators and participants in the Federative oath, whose communality was memorialized via partial, successive reproductions. The representation of every stage in the construction of the festival space, the arrival of fédérés in Paris, their reception upon their return, and the subsequent fireworks and illuminations contributed to this effect, for although such occurrences were not part of the official “event,” through their representation they were included as such in the emplotment of the festival’s

Figure 44 La nation française assistée par M. De Lafayette terrasse le despotisme et les abus du regne feodal qui terrassaient le peuple, 1790. Colored etching. Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Photo: Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

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Figure 45 Louis Lecoeur after Jacques-François-Joseph Swebach-­ Desfontaines, Serment fédératif du 14 juillet 1790, 1790. Colored aquatint and etching. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum Figure 46 La Fédération faite le 14 juillet 1790, almanach pour 1791, 1790. Colored etching. Archives Nationales, Paris, AE/II/3699. Photo: Atelier Photographique des Archives Nationales

mythology. In Cloquet and Le François’s engraving Vue générale de la Fédération française (fig. 47), a simultaneous reference to another form of conceptualizing the festival space is made explicit, commemorating reflexively the very print culture within which this image was itself produced and disseminated. This vertiginous aerial view of the Champ de Mars features two allegorical figures in the top left-hand corner, clad in red, white, and blue. One, representing union, is, like the new order itself,

young and innocent, carrying a fasces topped with a bonnet rouge. The other, representing fame, blows a trumpet, from which hangs a ground plan of the Champ de Mars similar to that adapted from architectural plans and popularized in printed souvenir maps of the arena (fig. 48). These maps themselves often contained views and elevations of the festival and its structures in subdivided boxes with lengthy explanations of the inscriptions and oaths.79 Within the

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Figure 47 Cloquet [del.] and Le François [scripsit.], Vue générale de la Fédération française prise à vôl d’oiseau au-dessus de Chaillot, 1790. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 48 Meusnier, Plan général du Champ de Mars et du nouveau cirque, ou La nation a prêté serment fédératif sur l’autel de la patrie le 14 juillet 1790 jour de l’anniversaire de la prise de la Bastille, 1790. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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festival itself, textual exegesis had been subordinate to representation, offering complementary explanation of a consummately visual event whose primary schema was clarity. The arch and altar were inscribed with revolutionary axioms (in vernacular French rather than Latin), while at the moment of the oath, banners displaying the text of the various declarations are alleged to have been held aloft for spectators to see, although views were, naturally, restricted. In their interaction with souvenir prints, viewers could attempt to make good this loss via a series of stills and close-ups. No single image, it seems, could represent the festival in its entirety. The Federative image had no “true copy” but was an aggregate of competing viewpoints, meanings, and references—each one of which represented a new beginning. This was an appropriate visual response to a festival at which threequarters of the crowd would not have been able to see Lafayette’s definitive oath and at which each participant was involved in a personal experiential narrative of the event alongside the masternarrative of collective similarity.80 As Ramette observes, such individualism was intrinsic to the “pointilliste” character of the revolutionary festival, allowing each spectator to recreate his or her own festive scene and bringing about “a sort of effacement of the event, a timelessness of the festival.”81 These images are dialogic, that is, essentially “argumentative,” dependent on and participating in a matrix of meanings, understandings, and value judgments. That which has been dialogized is unable to offer absolute authoritative interpretation as it is relativized and made aware of competing definitions. This may seem erroneous in the context of a festival intended to connote unity, concord, and history, yet images such as Cloquet’s demonstrate how such an effect could only be achieved in representation through dialogue between the festival’s component parts. Representations of revolutionary festivals accord to what Mikhail Bakhtin, in a vocabulary adopted from the natural sciences and applied to the development of the novel, termed “chronotopes.” Literally

a “space-time” in which both dimensions retain equal significance, in the fictional-artistic chronotope “time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”82 Representing the Federation required that artists confront the visual problem of creating a stable image of a transient and mobile event. Neither the bird’s-eye view of the arena nor the map, while both offering an image of simultaneity, could explain fully the festival’s spatial variegation. Likewise, the temporal allusions provoked by the allegories of union (the present) and fame (the past and future) were not captured satisfactorily by a single figure. To create total vision, or at least to aspire to it symbolically, only a combination of an aerial perspective and, as in Cloquet’s print, other images and other times could begin to piece together the meaning of the festival, to figure it as a medium of memory. Nonetheless, one of the primary symbolic attributes of the structures prepared for the Federation and the many subsequent revolutionary festivals was an insistent verticality— in the form of arches, altars, mountains, obelisks, trees, and columns—that counteracted the horizontality of the procession. This vertical axis was anticipated in the aerial perspective common to prints of the Federation. If the people atop the Federative arch in Prieur and Berthault’s print were symbolic embodiments of spectatorship, seeing in the place of all those who could not, then prints of the Federation promised a complete visual knowledge of the event. Roland Barthes, in a meditation on a more enduring temporary structure, the Eiffel Tower, built at the head of the Champ de Mars on the site of Cellerier’s arch, suggested that the panoramic image from the tower was engaged in a dialectical relationship between “euphoric,” gliding vision and an attempt to interpret and decipher its signs.83 For Barthes, this process was productive of memory and applied as much to the artist-as-spectator as it did to the viewer of the completed panorama, suggesting a revolutionary models | 93

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struggle for meaning, for reconstitution, all too apparent in both verbal descriptions of the Federation and in artists’ attempts to articulate the festive chronotope. As Barthes observed, the intellectual work demanded by panoramic vision ensured that “to perceive Paris from above is infallibly to imagine a history [. . .] it is duration itself which becomes panoramic.”84 For Barthes, the panorama ultimately frustrates the viewer. Becoming, like trompe l’oeil, a form of representation that prioritizes the act of looking over subject matter, the panorama does not, however, entirely abandon its subject. Rather, panoramic vision is invoked in the representation of the Federation as an allegory of the festival’s own visuality, operating in dialogue with it, not against it. In addition, the panoramic aspect of Federative images anticipates the commoditization of the panorama in the early nineteenth century as a spectacle that enabled a reflection upon city, self, and history.85 The panoramic view provided a perspective with which no earthbound spectator at the festival, even those watching from a distance from the hills of Chaillot, would have been familiar. The conceit of some bird’s-eye images of the Federation that allow a branch of foliage to intrude across the side of the picture frame, as if partially obstructing the spectator’s view, is less an effect that tricks the eye than a recognizable reference against which spectators can situate themselves. On 18 July 1790, a formal military celebration was held to conclude the Federation, an event at which an aerostatic demonstration was to provide the centerpiece at the Champ de Mars, where the first hydrogen-powered flight had taken place seven years earlier. Unfortunately, the tricolored balloon caught fire before takeoff, adding an element of humor to an otherwise morose affair (balloon disasters had been, as much as successful flights, a popular subject for prints prior to the Revolution). Despite this setback, balloon flights became an established part of festival itineraries, embodying the unrestrained and transparent vision that the rest of the festival

could never truly achieve. Furthermore, aerostatic festivals created a harmonious simultaneity from the otherwise fragmented procession and oath, which could not be viewed in their entirety by participants. Early balloon flights used optical equipment more for orientation than surveillance, and observation from a balloon was frowned upon, as concentration was required by all to make the balloon stay airborne.86 Balloon travel was effectively controlled by a commission created by the Académie Royale des Sciences, and the use of balloons was reserved, until the nineteenth century, for scientists or the military. Yet if, as seems likely, artists were not encouraged to take part in these flights, we should not assume that the ceremonial prominence of an aerial perspective lacked significance. Of course, few participants in festivals actually saw the festival in this holistic form. Yet the presence of balloons enabled an imaginative visualization of aerial space that was, in the manner described by Barthes, reconstituted by artists into printed images at once miniature and gigantic, from which a uniquely “revolutionary” history might be put together. Hauer’s painting of Lafayette and Roland (see fig. 36), recreating the image of the Federation beneath the stony gazes of the Revolution’s ideological forerunners, speaks directly to this historicizing aspect, while revealing too the anxieties that underpinned attempts to locate the festival in history. Each blind marble bust, situated behind the image on the easel, invokes a different angle of vision, but these lines of sight are simultaneously thwarted. Nonetheless, these sculptures, while obscured in a fusty marmoreal gloom, are solid, fixed, and permanent. Cellerier’s arch in Roland’s drawing (or etching), on the other hand, is elusive and immaterial, a product of Roland’s memory that Lafayette’s pointing finger appears to be trying to literally pin down. This painting is an attempt to resolve the problems raised by the provisionality of the festival structures and their subsequent representation. Whereas prints of the journée des

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brouettes spoiled ��������������������������������������������������������� the illusion of the festival structures (deliberately so, I have suggested) by dissecting them, prints of the festival itself attempt to make good this loss. Contemporary spectators at revolutionary festivals may not have been wholeheartedly convinced by the material appearance of the spectacle, recognizing tacitly its affinities with the theatrical. Nonetheless, in their consumption of festival images they bought into a validation of these installations as permanent monuments. In prints representing revolutionary festivals, the illusion is made complete, for, in reproduction, the effects of the festival were remade as more “real” than they appeared during the event itself. Paradoxically, the simulated unreal environment of the print rendered concrete the existence of events and objects that actually occurred, however briefly. Etching and engraving, based on a de-differentiating monochromy, conserved the festival as a stylized monument, and in this regard images of revolutionary festivals were theatricalized and illusionistic to a greater degree than could usually be tolerated within the festival space, where an undisguised, nondissimulative materiality was considered a condition of revolutionary virtue.

Jules Michelet famously described the festivals of the early stage of the Revolution as events at which there were no spectators, only actors.87 For Michelet, later festivals, such as that of the Supreme Being, reduced this participatory impulse to an absurdly literal degree, even as the heroic individual was honored—the lone actor or actress standing in for the passive, watching body of the people. Images of the Festival of the Federation, however, required a form of participation in which spectatorship was crucial, a distanced but nonetheless active form of looking that justified the ephemeral construction of the festival. Yet in the images themselves, individual participants were, for the most part, reduced to specks in the distance or homogenized in the crowd. To truly turn spectators into participants, a shift in scale had to occur and ritual objects had to travel to meet the people halfway. For this, however, we must take a sideways step from the wide-open spaces, grandiose effects, and limited time frame of the revolutionary festival to the small-scale, mobile, and infinitely reproducible possibilities offered by the souvenir image.

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CHAPTER FOUR

PERFORMING THE BASTILLE PIERRE-FRANÇOIS PALLOY AND THE MEMORY-WORK OF THE REVOLUTION

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Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust Of the Bastille, I sate in the open sun, And from the rubbish gathered up a stone, And pocketed the relic, in the guise Of an enthusiast; yet, in honest truth, I looked for something that I could not find WILLIAM WORDSWORTH The Prelude

In altering radically the meaning of individual and national identity alike, the French Revolution also provided opportunities for people to make themselves anew. Individuals whose lives had been lived previously in very different political and social circumstances were presented with opportunities to transform their existences, to develop new careers or to construct entirely new presentations of “self.”1 Sometimes, as in the case of characters such as Henri Masers de Latude, this took the form of a rewriting and selective editing of the past in a positive light; for others, it was as if they had been born fully formed revolutionary individuals on 14 July 1789, their earlier lives deleted and replaced by their present reality in a bodily enactment of Locke’s “tabula rasa.” These rebirths were ritualized at revolutionary festivals, whose temporary decorations were an outward manifestation of the rejection of the recent past. Needless to say, such transformations were not always successful, and previous lives frequently returned to haunt revolutionary subjects in unpredictable ways. In the early years of the Revolution, similar opportunities were also presented to those images and objects whose material existence predated the Revolution itself but that were remade, rethought, or repackaged in its wake. Possibly the most striking yet perplexing performance of both biography and material history surrounded the site of the Bastille, where a

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monumental and famously obdurate structure disappeared, only to reappear shortly afterward as hundreds of miniature replicas, as an infinitely reproducible outline, and as the focus for a number of artfully constructed revolutionary personae. Alongside its many symbolic meanings, the Bastille was, prior to 14 July 1789, known for its immobility, massive scale, and weight, characteristics that came to signify the unbending and obstinate power of late eighteenth-century monarchical justice. While the invasion of the Bastille has of course been the subject of histories too numerous to mention, the material aftereffects of its demolition have tended to be glossed.2 Even its first commemoration, the Festival of the Federation, emphasized a new ceremonial architecture over and above the remnants of the building itself. Nonetheless, the flattening and remaking of the Bastille under the direction of one individual, Pierre-François Palloy (fig. 49), provides one of the most intriguing examples of how a strategic provisionality structured an engagement with both the material traces of the former regime and the Revolution’s new visual culture. Palloy’s practice demonstrates how such provisionality was not always an outcome of necessity and a shortfall in materials or organization, but that it frequently exceeded the immediate needs of the present to provide radical new ways of thinking about both the past and the future. Wordsworth’s disillusionment at the Bastille site— where, as Jacques Rancière has written, “sunlight with no shadows and the silent winds composed a landscape that left the imagination bereft of its expectations”—was thrown into sharp relief by comparison to the beauty of an image of the old order, the tears on the cheek of Le Brun’s Magdalene.3 For the poet, this painting was unexpectedly better able to “recompense the traveller’s pains” than the dusty tundra at the Bastille, for the anticipated effect of the Bastille’s sublime and gloomy mass (Wordsworth’s missing “something”) was ill-served by the pocketable rubble that remained in its stead.

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Figure 49 Antoine Donchery, Portrait de Pierre-François Palloy, 1791. Oil on canvas. Musée Carnavalet, Paris, P104. Photo: Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet

This conundrum of scale and the question of how to compensate for the absence of a structure whose demolition was both necessary and traumatic were to be consistent, unresolved motifs in Palloy’s work. As historian Peter Fritzsche has observed, many other visitors to France also commented on the dull monotony of the French landscape in the aftermath of the Revolution, condemning France as a “country without memory.”4 The

concomitant enthusiasm for ruins, Fritzsche suggests, indicated a pervasive sense of melancholy, loss, and disconnection from the past that characterized the early nineteenth-century imagination. This feeling of detachment and disenfranchisement, whereby the past was reanimated “as a historical site of confrontation, defeat and resistance,” was produced by the Revolution’s radical rupture in time and its destabilization of tradition and social practices to the extent that it appeared that everything could be subject to imminent change.5 Yet whereas Fritzsche locates his analysis of the Revolution’s effects on subjects’ experience of time in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Palloy offers us a series of critical reflections on the matter of revolutionary history that proceed from its originary act. Furthermore, as Nina L. Dubin has argued recently in relation to the painter Hubert Robert, ruins had been interwoven with both aesthetic and financial discourses long before the Revolution, and Palloy’s practice might be similarly framed in the context of an eighteenth-century speculative economy that rendered increasingly fraught the relationship between a symbol and its meaning.6 However, while Palloy’s work undoubtedly responds to a complex array of contemporary discourses on ruination, it was centered on a practice of reconstitution, rather than destruction or decay. Operating in dynamic tension with the empty Bastille site but distinct from it, Palloy’s work did not demand that travelers make a pilgrimage to the Bastille but promised instead to multiply the absent Bastille and bring it directly to the people. Palloy’s practice, which was of course the reason for the evacuation of the Bastille site that so underwhelmed Wordsworth, also promised to redress the affective failure this brought about. By imbuing the prison’s remnants with an excess of meaning, Palloy aimed to trigger a number of emotional responses to the intersection of past materiality and new forms of time—the “raw material,” as Mona Ozouf has put it, “on which the Revolution obstinately worked.”7

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Jailhouse Rock In 1789, at the age of thirty-four, Pierre-François Palloy, self-taught master mason and self-advertised “architecte-­ entrepreneur,” was the wealthy proprietor of one of the largest building firms in Paris, employing around four hundred workers.8 An enthusiastic—bordering on compulsive—writer and diarist, and a verbose pamphleteer, Palloy later recounted how he had for some time coveted the formidable quantity of stone from which the Bastille was composed, claiming to have prophesied that it would be the first place to fall should dissatisfaction with the present regime take a violent turn.9 Presenting himself as a natural revolutionary, Palloy professed to have put workers on standby in readiness for this event, and he seems to have been well prepared on 14 July 1789, when with his team he was present at the invasion of the prison. Listed as “Pallet” in the official record, a misrecognition refuted throughout his career in his self-identification as “Patriote” Palloy, he moved swiftly to begin work on the Bastille’s demolition before official authorization had been given.10 Following the fabrication of an initial prototype by one of his workers, named Dax, Palloy commenced production of a set of replica “Bastilles,” accurate in detail, that were initially carved from large stones reclaimed from the prison. Soon after, the aesthetic of fragmentation that characterized this method was replaced by a more radical and no doubt more efficient process, as Palloy reduced the prison to its smallest elements before remaking it entirely anew. His workshops began to construct the models from a Bastille stone-dust paste, cast in a mold around a metal frame, finished with a chisel, and often adorned with wooden drawbridges, chains, and other miniature accoutrements (fig. 50). At this early stage, Palloy was not the only person eager to capitalize on the destruction of the Bastille, for a replica of the prison was also produced in faience by a citizen Ollivier, a “patriot of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.”11 The process of making Palloy’s

models was collaborative and somewhat experimental, bringing together a number of local artisans.12 Accompanied by actual fragments of the prison, including keys, chains, and entire stones, these reassembled “Bastilles” demonstrate the mediation and diversification of practice that typified Palloy’s work. From late 1790, Palloy’s reconstituted Bastilles were sent, free of charge, to every one of the eighty-three new départements of France, who were encouraged to display them in prominent positions or to make them the centerpieces of civic festivals.13 “Rebuilding” the Bastille according to a spatial plan described by the organization of the départements, the distribution of Palloy’s objects monumentalized France’s new administrative geography. This initiative was not entirely altruistic, for although he died in poverty in 1835 and despite his protestations to the contrary, Palloy undoubtedly hoped to make some profit from his work. In thinking about what might be considered “political art” during the French Revolution, a few paradigmatic artists inevitably and repeatedly present themselves, primarily those who participated in a sustained way in revolutionary political organization as members of the legislature or of political clubs. We are perhaps less comfortable with builders behaving like artists, and Palloy is seldom thought of in such a context, although as a certificate loaded with Bastille imagery issued to the mason François Rotier demonstrates, artists and construction workers were regularly considered together (fig. 51). Nonetheless, Palloy’s objects were produced in large numbers, manipulated under his direction from available materials, and operated at a remove from conventional spaces for the display and reception of art. Despite his involvement in a foundational act of erasure and his energetic if somewhat monomaniacal contribution to revolutionary visual culture, Palloy’s colorful persona, persistent self-promotion, and apparently opportunistic exploitation of circumstance have led to his marginalization as an eccentric arriviste proto-capitalist. His presumed attentionperforming the bastille | 99

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seeking and regular, often paranoid appeals to the French people well into the Napoleonic period and beyond—expressed always, in Charles Thurot’s derogatory description, in the “style of 1789”—have failed to make him much more than a fringe figure in the “real” story of the Revolution.14 Palloy, it seems, in keeping with the opinions of many of his contemporaries, is not to be trusted. Undoubtedly, an examination of Palloy’s writings reveals frequent shifts in position and a tactical shaping of rhetoric to suit circumstances.15 For instance, defending himself against accusations of fraud and treason made by Jean-Marie Roland, minister of the interior, and by Jean-Paul Marat (identified in manuscript additions to the text in Palloy’s own hand), Palloy invoked a radical polemic typical of the year II, in emulation

of Marat’s self-sacrificial claims. Never afraid to overstate his case, Palloy voiced his desire “to expire on the corpse of the last of the despots, and on the debris of the last Bastille.”16 “I have seen death more than once,” he asserted in 1792. “I have decided to make my tomb from Bastille stones.” In a speech two years later he recounted the unlikely tale of how Pâris, assassin of Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, had in fact attempted to kill him too shortly beforehand: “On the 23 January 1793, I made for the Le Peletier family, the homage of a Bastille stone, incorporating the letter that he wrote to the president in the name of the Convention. At the bottom of this stone was engraved the time of the assassination committed by the villain Pâris, who, some time before, planned to assassinate me too.”17 In August 1793, likely in response to

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Figure 50 Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Modèle de la Bastille, 1790. Plaster on metal frame. Musée Départemental des Antiquités de la Seine-Maritime, Rouen, 2002.0.188. Photo: Yohann Deslandes Figure 51 Certificat d’artiste, et d’ouvrier en bâtiment, ca. 1791. Etching and engraving. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

David’s portrait of the martyred Le Peletier (see fig. 26), Palloy presented to the Convention a Bastille stone engraved with the Rights of Man, with a downward-facing sword attached, bearing the legend “fatal to tyrants.”18 Duplicating the political language of the day and situating himself at the center of revolutionary history, Palloy regularly invoked the materiality of the Bastille, to which he always returned, as a comparative model for his own political virtue, which was cast as far more solid than the prison had proved to be.19 It has proved difficult to dislocate Palloy’s personality from his practice, such was his own investment in the repetitive affirmation of his authorial identity.20 For instance, Alan Weil writes that to achieve his success, Palloy “put to work all his physical resources (quite extensive) and his intellectual

resources (quite weak), all his dynamism and all the elements of his strange character that was at once puffed up with pride and naive.”21 However, Palloy’s idiosyncratic reconstruction of self in his writing was actually of a piece with his material practice, rather than an unfortunate or irritating aside. Alongside the Bastille replicas, an extensive and regular output of models and medals, furniture and memorabilia, not to mention a proliferation of pamphlets, essays, poems, plans, and justifications, often annotated and corrected by Palloy himself, represent one of the most remarkable oeuvres of the period. Although it is difficult to separate fact from self-­ dictated fiction, there are I think other ways of reading these objects, save as ersatz knickknacks, religious prostheses, commercial flotsam, or props to a fascinating and seductive performing the bastille | 101

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life story (although they are all these things too). What might these repetitions mean in the context of the Revolution, especially given the tension between rupture and repetition ingrained in the concept of revolution itself? Why might revolutionaries want to reconstitute and collect that which they had destroyed so purposefully? How does an object become revolutionary, and what does it do when it gets there? Palloy’s rhetoric and practice mobilize a particularly agile affirmation of revolutionary politics in progress that has important implications for our understanding of how revolutionary history was mediated in visual culture. A regular criticism of Palloy, that he merely paid lip service to the most recent political stance, actually points to a kind of discursive reproduction at play in his work. Paralleling his reuse of the found materials of the Bastille, Palloy’s writing and objectmaking combine to form a practice we might interpret as radically reproductive. Palloy’s political allegiances may have fluctuated, like those of many others at this time, but his work was nonetheless that of a man keenly aware of—and, more important, able to control—the signs of revolutionary participation. Moreover, Palloy’s exploitation of the unstable boundary between the “authenticity” of the Bastille relics and their palpable artifice, and his interpolation of these issues with narratives of both the Revolution at large and his own biography were achieved in a demonstrably self-aware manner. Palloy’s reproduction of the Revolution’s material traces amounts to a history of the Revolution itself, conceived in terms that are best understood as performative. As originally described by J. L. Austin, the performative describes a statement whose utterance in a sense makes the act (the example often cited is “I do” in a marriage ceremony).22 Performative utterances are neither true nor false, even if the promise they contain is not followed through. In his writing and in the production of his objects (which were made, quite literally, to be performed ), Palloy advanced a form of citation-

ality that was entwined with ritualized repetitions in a wider revolutionary culture.23 In the process, Palloy produced a performative history of the Revolution that was at once always already made—a return to origins—and at the same time constantly in the process of making itself anew.

Residual Objects Palloy’s objects commemorated the Revolution’s constitutive act, dispersing at the same time the victorious spoils of Ancien-Régime symbolic practice and embodying what Linda Nochlin calls “a pulverization of what were perceived to be its repressive traditions.”24 Described in one speech as “simulacra of former servitude, today the living proof of the Liberty of the French,” models of the Bastille were, as Lüsebrink and Reichardt observe in their detailed analysis of Bastille symbolism, characterized by the symbolic doubleness typical of all that pertained to the vanquished prison, which came to signify both tyranny and freedom.25 In addition, Palloy’s “Bastilles” were materially as well as politically ambiguous, for they occupied an indeterminate, occasionally parodic territory between sculpture, architecture, and performance. Despite this uncertainty, these objects were not produced in a vacuum and should be considered alongside the field of sculptural practice during the Revolution, because of, not in spite of, their provisional character. As Annie Jourdan has pointed out, sculpture was forced into a difficult position during the revolutionary period, for “this art of the real that ‘revived heroes and great men,’ dreamed of since the first day of the Revolution,” was also “the art most affected by the absence of competitions and the lack of commissions.”26 In 1792 Palloy himself remarked on this phenomenon, subtly enhancing the aesthetic value of his Bastille relics by implying that disenfranchised artists were able to find work making them: “The abandonment of the arts is the greatest calamity of an Empire:

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it is this we have seen in the current disruption. Many artists have been forced to labor in the charitable works in order not to starve. I have seen at the Bastille site men of the first class, they seem, in these workshops, like men beaten by a tempest.”27 Palloy’s solution to the problem was the establishment of a large construction works, rebuilding large swathes of eastern Paris and inaugurating a permanent monument on the Place de la Bastille. This would have the side effects of reviving trade, helping the indigent, and encouraging artistic emulation.28 As Allan Potofsky has shown recently, the discourses surrounding revolutionary iconoclasm on the one hand and monumental utopian architecture on the other have masked the true nature of the construction trades during the Revolution.29 In fact, rather than signaling a decline, the early years of the Revolution provided a number of new business opportunities for builders, aided in part by a significant expansion in public works projects.30 Appealing to the legislature as an “artist of the second class,” Palloy was explicit about his own capabilities, admitting that the “ebullience” of his ideas outweighed his talent. Nevertheless, as this statement suggests, Palloy did consider himself an artist, while the existence of several of his sketched plans for Bastille-related images points to his creative agency.31 However, Palloy imagined his Bastille project primarily as a “base” for other more talented artists to complete.32 Moreover, he couched his project in an art historical framework of politically motivated progress and “popular” agency. In Palloy’s vision of the future: Painters, architects, sculptors; amateurs will contribute everything, and the old habit that artists formed of not leaving their premises will disappear, for though it is necessary to respect the merit of the orders of architecture, which will always be the base of the artist; I argue that each century has its own form and its own taste, as in the past the ancien régime: today, in the new one,

our laws dictate that every artist who has created and mothered beautiful things will produce them under the eyes of the public [. . .]. Then those who cultivate the arts and sciences can present themselves in the street; taste will decide, and perfection will win the day. How many beautiful and new ideas in all genres we will see then! 33 A comparable rhetoric of artistic regeneration is apparent in David’s stated desire, two years later, to “look to produce the new, and to depart from ordinary or known forms.”34 Despite the repetition of “known forms” in his own practice—the insistence on the continuing relevance of the architectural orders is particularly telling—Palloy was nothing if not imaginative. His objects arrived in a variety of designs, from slabs engraved with images of the king or with an attached print of the plan of the Bastille (fig. 52) to smaller items such as the set of dominoes made from the governor of the Bastille’s windowsill, presented to the dauphin in 1791.35 They also included a number of commemorative medals (fig. 53) and the fragments of stone, iron, or wood from which the memorabilia of vainqueurs was put together. Lumps of Bastille reappeared elsewhere too as part of the architectural fabric of Paris: for instance, the Pont de la Révolution, completed with Bastille stones in 1791, and, naturally, Palloy’s house at Sceaux. In 1793, emboldened by the success of his initiative, Palloy sent Bastille stones engraved with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen to all 544 districts of France, although by this stage the Revolution’s radical turn and the execution of Louis XVI had stripped Palloy’s objects of the portraits of the king that had accompanied them previously and with which they were often adorned.36 In the words of Palloy himself, exploiting a gothic sensibility that had become a primary mode of discourse about the prison: “From the same stones of these awful dungeons, I have reconstructed the image of this grave of the living.”37 This transubstantive effect was compared by several commentators, including Palloy performing the bastille | 103

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Figure 52 Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Stone from the Bastille, with Attached Plan of the Bastille, 1790. Bastille stone with colored aquatint of plan by J.-B. Chapuy. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, D 1983.1. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/ Domaine de Vizille Figure 53 Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Medal Made from Bastille Remnants, 1790. Lead. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum

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himself, to the miraculous multiplication described in Christian parables. From an old image, a new image was formed, “the grave of the living,” which was itself mythic and subject to fresh manipulations; given the absence of prisoners in the Bastille at the moment of its invasion, tales of manacled skeletons and aged prisoners were fabricated swiftly to disguise a potentially embarrassing lack.38 Materializing the Enlightenment rhetoric of casting light into obscured—indeed, unimagined—space, Palloy’s miniature “Bastilles” maximized the three-dimensionality of the prison, creating surfaces where none had existed previously and making visible the hitherto invisible.39 Palloy could claim a unique authority in this regard, as in his role as demolisher of the Bastille, he possessed special knowledge regarding the interior geography of the prison. As Michael Taussig has written, the process of defacement is similar in many regards to that of Enlightenment, in that it brings hidden interiors into public view and demystifies secret knowledge. Yet this exposure comes at a cost for, as Taussig notes, the defaced

object may become curiously animated by the process, evincing a “curious magic.”40 The repression of these magic qualities defines the discourse of Enlightenment but threatens, at the same time, to undo its authority and expose its irrational underbelly. Palloy’s strange residual works, which lurch between the monumental and the ephemeral, foreground the extraordinary visibility of the objects—their miraculous, enchanted reappearance before the eyes of witnesses—as key to their significance. With Palloy’s Bastilles, reproduction adds value rather than diminishing it. In comparison to, for instance, the fragments of the demolished Berlin Wall that circulated two hundred years later, with which they are often compared, the Bastille stones were not authenticated by the presence of original graffiti, indentations, or other “scarification.”41 Rather, they were produced in accordance with a polished aesthetic of smoothness and “realistic” representation, returned whole to a state of preobsolescence. Such verisimilitude was not without its critics, especially in the context of a wider field of provisional, moveable sculpture and architecture, against which the fragmented, archaic yet futuristic materiality of Palloy’s objects should be read. In revolutionary France, the primary place to experience such forms of objecthood was the organized revolutionary festival.

Disappearing Acts Revolutionary festivals provided a ritual framework that heightened the effect of Palloy’s “Bastilles,” magnifying their embodied tension between the permanent and the impermanent in the context of the revolutionary festivals’ own dialectic of construction, destruction, and reproduction. Although the cortège of the Festival of the Federation began at the Place de la Bastille, Palloy himself was not directly involved in the official festival, and his objects, prominent in later ceremonies performing the bastille | 105

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Figure 54 Antoine Cosme Giraud, Le XIV juillet MVCCLXXXX. Fédération des français, 1790. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

such as the David-orchestrated Panthéonisation of Voltaire, were mostly absent. Despite this, Palloy certainly made his presence known via the gift of a plan of the Bastille to the National Assembly on 14 July 1790, in commemoration of the day.42 Palloy would later become part of official committees charged with the design of festivals such as the Festival of the Supreme Being, yet as Ozouf has noted, the relative absence of the Bastille in the official ceremony of 1790 is striking, for “it appears that as early as one year after the event, they found no need to rely upon the visual representation of the Bastille, still less to have recourse to a mimed dramatic production. [. . .] The festival of Fédération [. . .] pretended to a universality that too precise a localization would threaten to destroy.”43 Furthermore, given that the Federation was ostensibly an attempt to neutralize the threat of regional

militias, intimations of popular violence, even the storming of the Bastille, were played down. Nonetheless, as a print of the Federation by Giraud featuring a “Bastille” on the steps of the altar at the moment of the oath demonstrates (fig. 54), Palloy’s works were certainly meaningful in this context, for the destruction of the impregnable Bastille inevitably haunted the fragile structures that commemorated it. This image is highly unusual in representing a Bastille relic in such a position at the festival, and it may be that its presence here is an attempt to key viewers in to the historical meaning of the event. As has already been noted, the artists responsible for these festival prints and those who saw them attempted to reconstitute visually a holistic account from a patchwork of fleetingly seized, temporally separate impressions. Viewing images of revolutionary events and

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rituals, like Palloy’s practice itself, involved piecing together the scattered fragments of an irrecoverable past. In her letters from France written in 1790, Helen Maria Williams revealed the extent to which the destruction of the signs of feudalism engendered a pleasurable nostalgia in the tourist: “Before I suffered my friends at Paris to conduct me through the usual routine of convents, churches, and palaces, I requested to visit the Bastille; feeling a much stronger desire to contemplate the ruins of that building than the most perfect edifices in Paris.”44 Notwithstanding an enthusiasm for the aura of recent historical event and an attunement to contemporary notions of the picturesque, Williams’s text also highlights the absence of a permanent monument to the Revolution on this site. Rather, absence was the primary characteristic of the Revolution’s paradigmatic ritual spaces, for the Bastille figured as both a vanished object and the empty space it used to occupy. This is not to say that there was nothing at the Bastille for tourists to see, for Palloy had extended his income by selling tickets to thrill-seekers keen to spend a night of gothic terror in the prison’s notorious underground cells. However, by the time of Williams’s visit, there were, in fact (as Wordsworth, Schlegel, and other European visitors noted), hardly any ruins left for contemplation, the prison having been demolished in record time before being reassembled as miniature simulacra of its former self. Palloy’s primary contribution to the Festival of the Federation was the organization of a party that lasted for several days afterward on the Bastille site, where a ghostly projection of the outline of the prison was traced by a garlanded wooden scaffold. The centerpiece of this structure was a flagpole, surrounded by musicians and measuring the exact height of the former prison, marked with a placard reading “ici on danse” (fig. 55). This diversionary addition to the official festival offered welcome respite from the parades of soldiers and interminable oaths, inserting a joyous apparition

of the Bastille into a time-space from which it was predominantly absent. Describing fully the space occupied by the demolished prison but doing so in temporary materials that accentuated its transparency and provisionality rather than its irrevocable presence, this witty installation exemplified Palloy’s skillful manipulation of materials in the service of revolutionary memory. Echoing the temporary stage sets in mid-­construction and the popular festivity of the journée des brouettes, the event set the tone for future equivocation over the correct use of the razed site, a space that anthropologist Philip Smith has suggested moved through profane, sacred, liminal, and mundane transformations, whereby opposition to Ancien-Régime authority was “increasingly expressed through the frivolous, ludic and individualistic micro-rituals of anti-structure, rather than orderly, disciplined solemn remembrance.”45 Palloy’s objects and events operated within but also against the commemorative ceremonies of the Revolution. At the limits of official ritual, Palloy’s practice was not—could not be—­ accommodated fully by a Revolution that was keen to efface the traces of that which preceded it and uneasy about the objects it had produced to replace them. Yet for this reason, his work is important for its troubling insistence on the persistence of the past in the revolutionary present; for complicating the straightforward division of objects, histories, and people into new and old; and for forcing reflection upon the paradoxical conditions of materiality in 1790s France. On the other side of Paris, the Champ de Mars was also, like the Bastille site, empty, although Palloy campaigned tirelessly to erect a monument at the center of both spaces.46 History was constructed through reflection upon a vacuum, these empty and emptied spaces resonating as publicly sanctified revolutionary “stages.” Nevertheless, some, such as Armand-Guy Kersaint, were not convinced that the Champ de Mars could function as an adequate ritual site. “But this arena is abandoned,” he argued, “the altar of the fatherland, performing the bastille | 107

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Figure 55 Vue de la fête donnée sur le plan de la Bastille, 1790. Etching and aquatint. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 56 Le dégel de la nation, 1792. Etching and aquatint. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum

composed of fragile materials, seems to say to despotism: the oath of the French, which made you tremble, will be fragile and fleeting like me.”47 The association between material and political solidity was to be restated repeatedly by counterrevolutionary print publishers. Allusions to the political consequences of revolutionary ephemerality were particularly pronounced in one image representing a wax Liberty figure melting in the rays of a royalist sun (fig. 56).48 As with many counterrevolutionary images, this print was circulated overseas (a version exists with Italian text), where it would have provided a strong counter to the Revolution’s monumental aspirations. In its sardonic reference to lost-wax casting, this image draws attention to the Revolution’s failure to manufacture bronze statues of its own, suggesting a half-made Revolution falling apart mid-process. Kersaint’s indignation may have been fueled by recurrent physical attacks on the Federative structures, putting into words an uneasiness already apparent in images representing monsters of despotism rising from beneath the altar at the moment of the Federative oath (see fig. 44). When the altar

was assaulted by a group of counterrevolutionaries dressed as priests who, after killing a guard, proceeded to wipe out the inscriptions and tear the fragile canvas decorations that adorned the structure, and also when the Federation of 1791 was disrupted by royalists throwing stones at the altar, it became painfully obvious that the Revolution’s symbolic objects could be destroyed with surprising ease.49 Proposing an altar made from indestructible Bastille stones, Kersaint was aware that the “rhetoric of substitution” for which the Federation, constructed in a hurry, was excused raised significant problems for further revolutionary rituals and commemorations.50 It was, however, hardly ideal that such rituals were dependent on the solid materials of the Ancien Régime, however imaginatively transformed. The objects, sculptures, paintings, and architecture that, excluding the participants, were the substantive feature of revolutionary rituals materialized a conflict between those, such as Gence, who had claimed in the year II that “one should above all strike the soul by the eyes, the most powerful of our organs, and display for everyone to see a series of

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objects, whose assemblage could be easily grasped by all,” and the position outlined by Bénézech, who insisted in 1797 that “this is no longer the time in which one could not give festivals to the people without erecting fragile monuments at great cost, which interest the eyes without satisfying reason.”51 Palloy’s objects should be understood as both produced and riven by this long-running conflict, a series of debates that frequently hinged on a disagreement between partisans or opponents of the theatrical who sought to define a revolutionary ritual without spectacle.52 Throughout the Revolution, ideologues and legislators expressed considerable anxiety regarding the status of representation and the utility of images. The gap between “reality” and its representation often proved an insurmountable obstacle. When Rousseau, sublime referent of the Revolution, expressed his horror in old age at having told a weak lie in his youth, he anticipated the suspicion with which late eighteenth-century political subjects viewed all forms of concealment, falsehood, and masquerade.53 This anxiety about dissimulation reached its apotheosis during the Terror, as a

paranoiac obsession with unmasking climaxed on the political stage. Nevertheless, from the earliest days of the Revolution, the fear of the Revolution disintegrating and the establishment of difference from “Ancien-Régime” privacy and deception encouraged a belief that an undisguised materiality should figure as a condition of revolutionary virtue. Palloy’s Bastille replicas, despite being made of the Bastille, were clearly not the Bastille; their ambiguous material status and impresario presentation counted against them when it came to their integration into legitimate revolutionary ritual. The use of temporary objects and structures in ritual contexts was problematic largely because it raised the specter of theatrical production. Revolutionary theater was pedagogical and provided intriguing models for political representation, but it was also ephemeral and unpredictable, and it seemed to prioritize emotion and the senses over the “rational” publicity generated by the printed word.54 Moreover, the theater was presumed to separate actors from their audience and to encourage an unhealthy degree of passivity in spectators. This association between festivals and theater became increasingly

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contentious as the Revolution progressed, culminating in Claude-François Payan’s speech to the National Convention banning the theatrical representation of the Festival of the Supreme Being.55 Nonetheless, festivals and the stage shared a history, actors, and, inevitably, props. At the Festival of Reunion of 10 August 1793, otherwise known as the Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic, David planned a suitably dramatic conclusion at the Champ de Mars. “Finally,” he wrote, “a vast theater will be constructed where the principal events of our Revolution will be represented in mime.”56 Desmoulins, for one, writing in Le Vieux Cordelier, was disgusted by what he considered a trivialization of the Revolution’s grand claims by those who sought to overcome the disparity between image and ideal. “And by what other sign can I recognize this divine liberty?” he wrote. “This liberty, is it to be more than a vain name? Isn’t it only an actress from the Opéra, Candeille or Maillard strolling with a bonnet rouge, or even this 46 foot high statue that David proposes? If by liberty you don’t, like me, understand principles, but only a piece of stone, there has never been a more stupid and costly idolatry than ours.”57 Paradoxically, the use of real women to embody Liberty or to serve as living incarnations of virtues arose from an appetite for a transparent, natural form of representation that would dispense with superstitious desires for false images.58 The use of a real figure also promised to avoid the miniaturization that plagued many three-dimensional festival representations, reducing the ritual object to the level of parody or insignificance—a problem that particularly threatened the acceptance of Palloy’s objects. The pedagogical utility of images and the perceived supremacy of sight among the senses accounted for the retention of some representation in centrally organized rituals, although in the search for “detheatricalized” ritual allegorical allusions were increasingly preferred to mimicry and illusion,

forming a contrast with the documentary character of the prints that represented these events.59 In a post-Thermidorean climate hostile to the perceived excesses of Jacobin festivals, one “Docteur Dicaculus,” warning in 1798 against the “false ideas” of previous regimes, urged the organizers of festivals, with heavy irony, to “bleach the palaces, raise plaster colossi, obelisks made of planks, canvas decorations, sublime employment of the arts!”60 Typically, each regime derided the cluttered and morally dubious rituals of their predecessors before instituting their own. For Bénézech, it remained essential that teachers take part in festivals, marching at the head of their students, to ensure that the educative promise of the festival should not be overlooked and to guarantee “that these ceremonies will not be vain representations.”61 This suspicion of the visual was nonetheless tempered by an awareness of the potential power of images, and Reveillière-Lépeaux, seeking to socialize festivals in relation to institutions of marriage and religion, still believed in 1797 that the visual spectacle of the festival had an unequaled effect on the spectator, for “it is there that the greatest pictures will be placed before the citizen; it is in these grand occasions that the most elevated sentiments and the most sublime enthusiasms must strike his imagination.”62 From the outset, sculpture was considered the most appropriate form of representation for inclusion in a festival, with plaster the most common material for construction. A medial substance that, while cheap and pliable, retained a degree of solidity and three-dimensionality, plaster was a compromise between the overt ephemerality of cardboard and paint and the impracticable expense of bronze or marble. Likewise, stucco applied to canvas and environmental additions such as trees accommodated a nominal verisimilitude with minimal cost. Painting, on the other hand, was more problematic, as a medium that was both expensive and more readily associated with a deceptive, mediated illusionism. Even David, describing his elaborate itinerary for the

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Festival of Reunion, was adamant that such ritual performances were infinitely preferable to “a futile and insignificant painting,” seemingly undermining his own presentation of his portraits of Republican martyrs in a processional context.63 At the Festival of the Supreme Being, sculptures representing Egoism, Atheism, and, improbably, Nothingness were symbolically burnt. Durability could have negative connotations too, for as unsympathetic commentators rejoiced in pointing out, the fire failed to fully consume these objects, leaving a charred, smoking, but still recognizable residue.64 Two years earlier, at the festival of 15 April 1792 commemorating the Swiss of Châteauvieux, a giant statue of Liberty supported by an antique chariot dominated the proceedings, its hands and face constructed of bronze-painted plaster, with a body made of wood that was covered with canvas.65 This model proved popular and reappeared in subsequent festivals, most notably the Festival of the Supreme Being. Dupont de Nemours was unimpressed with the design of the festival, whose artifice he found disturbingly similar to that of religious ceremonies. Furthermore, Dupont associated this deception with a troublesome ambiguity, complaining in a letter to Jérôme Pétion that “you believed that in order to trick the Parisians, it would suffice to substitute for the word purify, that of burn incense, and in the place of instruction regarding such and such bas-reliefs and such and such inscriptions, the vaguer announcement of paintings, sculptures, and inscriptions.”66 This anxiety about transience and ambiguity pervades the majority of festival plans, and it was discernable in other ritual contexts too. As varied attempts to address it, we might consider the colossal Bastille stone (procured, of course, by Palloy) with Mirabeau’s name highlighted in gold lettering, to be placed on a corner of the street where he lived; the proposal for the festival in honor of Marat, in which a large cube, a “symbol of solidity,” would take center stage; or the song chanted at the Festival of Liberty, frimaire year II (November–December 1793), a mock

dialogue between France and Liberty, in which “France” swore an oath “cemented” by the blood of the dead king.67 These concerns were also brought to the fore in the atypical burlesque festivals that appeared outside of legislative intervention in the year II and again after Thermidor, featuring mock executions, dressing up, and processions.68 Such carnivalesque and fauxceremonial leanings were already apparent in proposals such as that for a “funeral of aristocrats” that, in 1790, was planned to comprise a parodic procession of money and administrative papers suspended from pikes, shrouded in black, and advancing solemnly under the heading “caisse d’escompte”; they were also a persistent aspect of Palloy’s work.69 Contemporary accounts regularly described Palloy’s objects as “simulacra,” a term that was recontextualized in the Revolution in relation to ritual culture. The Encyclopédie defined “simulacra” as an ancient word meaning an idol, image, or representation, connecting its usage to idolatrous literature. Meanwhile, the act of simulation was described as “fraudulous disguise,” that is, a form of disguise more deceptive and insidious than mere dissimulation.70 Ozouf argues that the major significations of the word can be observed in contemporary dictionaries, where a simulacre is either an image of a pagan deity or a figural representation of an action.71 Both of these meanings can be seen in the context of revolutionary festivals: busts of revolutionary martyrs or statues carried in procession, “living statues” of Reason, and mock battles and theatricalized demonstrations of significant events. Ozouf suggests that the increased use of simulation as the Revolution progressed pointed to a collective failure in memory that the simulacra aimed to resuscitate, unnecessary in the early years of Revolution as a result of the Federation’s unequaled symbolic and emotional effects.72 Both the definitions Ozouf outlines are brought together in Palloy’s models, their sheer presence alluding to the revolutionary action of the Bastille’s taking as well as figuring the vanquished prison itself as a kind of deity whose power lingered performing the bastille | 111

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after destruction. Although the plaster-like reconstituted stone of Palloy’s “Bastilles” accorded to the material expectations that revolutionaries placed on their ritual objects, they remained problematic for their collapsing of difference between the thing represented and the object representing, and for their confusion of the past and the present, the real and the false. So the absence of simulacra in the early Federative festivals and their emergence in later state-organized rituals might not in fact indicate a failure in memory. If anything, Palloy’s objects evince an excess of memory and show that reenactment, reproduction, and recollection were crucial from the very start of the Revolution. In fact, the marginalization of his works in early revolutionary rituals, at an official level at least, might suggest a desire to stave off false memories and to avoid a potentially disastrous slippage between simulation and dissimulation.

Spirits of the Gift Whereas the ephemeral structures seen at revolutionary festivals were politically and morally suspect, Palloy’s objects were at least materially profound, although their reduced scale lent a potentially farcical aspect to proceedings. These issues were, to a large degree, resolved by a transition to other media. Like other ritual structures, Palloy’s objects were reinforced by reproduction; Palloy produced rings and stamps, created from melted-down Bastille chains and shaped into the by now infamous outline of the prison. With these accessories, certified Bastille conquerors could articulate their identities as revolutionary heroes by impressing an outline of the Bastille into wax seals. Moreover, Palloy frequently described his project via metaphors of impression, as a means of printing the memory of the prison on the minds of citizens, but also, as in the case of his gift of stones to the revolutionary armies fighting on France’s frontiers, as a means of “impressing” on the enemies of the Revolution that the Bastille had indeed

been destroyed.73 Reproducing his Bastille models in print or joining together printed plans of the Bastille with fragments of engraved and subsequently edited stone (see fig. 52), Palloy was able to maximize the impact of his work and ensure that it received validation. In the gift economy initiated by Palloy, reciprocity was essential, the gifting of the remains of the Bastille ultimately transferring symbolic capital back to their author. In one of his numerous self-justifications, Palloy described how “several men of letters and authors have sent me their works, among others Citizens Dussault, C. Villette, Collot d’Herbois, Cloost, Manuel and others, which I accepted with great pleasure. Several patriotic journalists have visited me with their families who I accepted with pleasure; artists have sent me paintings, engravings and diverse ornaments; I hurry to respond to them with pieces of stone, iron and fragments that I have metamorphosed, and in the different forms that I give them to them, they can be used to decorate their cabinets, as those that they send me augment my library.”74 Palloy describes here a process of exchange in which he effectively internalizes the products of art and politics, which are given in exchange for his “metamorphoses.” Accompanied with pseudo-religious ceremony by “apostles of Liberty,” whose accounts of picaresque travels around France narrated the various responses to Palloy’s project, the “relic” stones arrived at their destinations in large blue boxes, accompanied by a certificate and a range of artifacts from the prison itself. As the Goncourt brothers put it, these young men traveled with “their pockets full of his rubble, and a mouth full of speech that he had made them repeat.”75 The intention was that the stones be paraded in ceremonial form through the streets of each town (fig. 57), accompanied by civic fanfare and, possibly, a fraternal meal.76 Sanctified through material derivation from the originary point of the Revolution and processed to “altars” to be blessed, the stones explicitly used

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the language of religious sentiment as a means of conferring sacredness on revolutionary action. Fascinatingly, Palloy sometimes referred to the stones as “ex-votos,” although the higher power to which they were addressed appears to have been the Revolution itself. Equally, these boxes, like the time capsule under the Bastille site, function as composite archives of the Revolution in progress, an attempt to both narrate and manage the history of the Revolution through the fragments it had thrown up in its wake. The opening of the boxes that Palloy circulated around France was often an occasion for civic spectacle. However, as Palloy described it, “the inauguration of a Bastille stone isn’t just one of those sparkling ceremonies that strike the imagination instantly, the impression of which fades away with the equipment of the spectacle. The philosopher who reasons and feels, discovers touching instruction in this civic ceremony, which he means you to understand, and which is worthy of the friends of the Constitution, of Liberty, of Equality, of the Nation. It is to develop Citizens less educated than yourselves, Messieurs, that it is, in short, the alphabet of our emerging Liberty.”77 Palloy’s desire to play down the spectacular or theatrical qualities of the stones’ reception in favor of their long-term pedagogical role in forming ideal revolutionary subjects did not come at a cost to their evident visual effect. These objects were made to be seen and possibly to be touched too. This point was reiterated by Navier, president of the Administrative Assembly of the department of the Cote d’Or, who in a speech welcoming one of Palloy’s containers, described how “all those who have made any study of the human heart, know the power of the empire of signs, and the force with which men are swept along by their language. History recounts on every page the revolutions that signs have operated or maintained.”78 Navier continued to outline the effect that the Bastille models would impart on their viewers: “At the appearance of this monument, they believe they see the somber dungeons; the

Figure 57 Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, Modèle de la Bastille, ca. 1790. Gouache on card. Musée Carnavalet, Paris, D9062. Photo: Musée Carnavalet/Roger-Viollet

noise of chains strikes their ear; the long wails of the victims resound in their hearts: a salutary horror will keep away tyrants everywhere.”79 This apotropaic function is evident elsewhere too, for instance, in Citizen Representant Laplanche of the department of the Loiret’s account of how the incoming Bastille stone would instantly “inoculate” the souls of all who viewed it and “electrify” their spirits.80 The devotional allusions of Palloy’s work from the early 1790s were in keeping with the secularized religiosity of the Festival of the Federation. Le Moniteur of 16 July had recognized “what religious sentiment dominates this immense multitude!” while the procès-verbal of the National Assembly recorded that it was “in the middle of a profound and religious silence that the National Assembly and the French people received the oath of their king.”81 Even Desmoulins acknowledged the extent to which the toil of free citizens in the creation of the Champ de Mars consecrated the space in

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which the festival took place as “a religious monument.”82 Meanwhile, Federative images, in their function as “visual oaths,” recalled confraternity prints, which, distributed free of charge prior to the Revolution on an annual basis and produced in large runs, served to perpetuate the processional of the feast day associated with a particular confraternity.83 The Committee of the National Guard in Lille appeared to have had the conjunction of saint’s day and civic ceremony in mind when they arranged for their Federative celebrations to take place on 6 June 1790, the day of the solemn procession of Notre-Dame de la Treille and the local patronal festival.84 There are clear echoes of confraternity imagery in some Federation prints that include a calendar common to religious almanacs and devotional imagery of this kind and down the sides, in one example, standing in for saintly likenesses, portraits of the legislators Lafayette, Lameth, Sieyès, Bailly, Thouret, and Camus (see fig. 46). Participation in the Federation required something approaching a pilgrimage for fédérés from around the country, who made what was to be in many cases the greatest journey of their lives and were presented with a medal and a certificate by the municipality of Paris to confirm their presence at the ceremony.85 The pilgrimage of individuals to the Federation was accompanied by the feverish circulation of images and other devotional mementos, as print publishers sought to cash in on the piety of an audience whose size was unprecedented since the decline in the production of religious imagery engendered by the Revolution. The affordable images and objects that circulated to witnesses at the Federation in 1790—many of them issuing from Palloy’s workshops—were supplemented by a range of advice literature, prints, and souvenirs that had been quickly produced for sale from the moment that a Federative festival had been announced, perhaps the “flattering memories” described in one popular song as being brought back to the provinces after the Festival

of the Federation.86 These memory-objects returned with their bearers to their towns of origin where, in an effective use of “ephemera” as a guarantee against transience, they were themselves paraded as precious relics in subsequent processions.87 Despite the connotations of commodification that accompanied Palloy’s work, he in fact distributed many of his larger objects for free, and he was not reimbursed for the demolition of the Bastille for several years. Yet despite his insistence that the Revolution had already cost him “more than five hundred thousand livres,” he was accused of appropriating public funds, and he was imprisoned briefly in December 1793 for embezzlement.88

Souvenirs Palloy’s “Bastilles” oscillate between the miniature and the gigantic, for the sheer size of the prison allowed for its ready transformation into numerous exchangeable objects, while despite their small size we cannot but be aware of their metonymic scale. The desire for effective souvenirs may explain, in part at least, the drive to aggrandize and romanticize the monumentality of the Bastille, exaggerating the scale of the prison, as was the case in many contemporary images. For instance, Robert’s painting of the prison in the first stage of its demolition represents its towers as a looming colossal mass (fig. 58), but also, as Dubin observes, as “an event in the making, an ambition on the verge of fulfillment.”89 The aesthetic and commercial possibilities of the Bastille site often went hand in hand. Describing one of the Bastille replicas, Legros, one of Palloy’s envoys, encouraged his audience to imagine the enormity of the former prison by reflecting on its reduced model. Cutting a sublime rhetoric of gigantic, unknowable scale with precise information on the Bastille’s measurements (ninety-six feet in height), Legros was eager to assert the extent to which the transition from massive prison

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Figure 58 Hubert Robert, La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition, 1789. Oil on canvas. Musée Carnavalet, Paris, P1476. Photo: Musée Carnavalet/ Roger-Viollet

to miniature simulacra was a historical process, rooted in the intangibility of the absent fortress.90 As Susan Stewart notes, we have no need for souvenirs of events that are repeatable but desire instead “souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality has escaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.”91 For Stewart, “the souvenir displaces the point of authenticity as it itself becomes the point of origin for narrative.”92 This account of origins, moreover, is “not a narrative of the object; it is a narrative of the possessor.”93 Palloy’s staging of Bastille stones as the central focus of self-directed tableaux exemplify the turn to a narrative in which the past exists only insofar as it can be read through the destruction of the prison and its material residues. Typically, souvenirs require or at least induce particularity to the individual who possesses them, yet the miniature “Bastilles” evoke a fluctuation between individualization and a form of communality, in which the relationship of the souvenir to the individual is projected onto a wider social conception of what or who the individual might be: the fantasy, at least, of a unified “revolutionary” subject. Indeed, Palloy’s objects, especially the simulacral “Bastilles,” are particularly interesting for their potential to articulate new models for subjectivity. While we might expect to see ruins evoked in the aftermath of Revolution as a way of comprehend-

ing its effects on time and the dispersal of individuals, to see them repackaged, circulated, and received with such enthusiasm in the early 1790s suggests that the early years of the Revolution may have been more traumatic an experience than might sometimes appear. In these works, the true nature of the prison’s destruction and the shock of its obliteration are masked by its return in miniature form. We might even consider Palloy’s models in the terms laid out by psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, who described as “transitional objects” physical objects that facilitate the child’s separation from the mother by forming a fantasized bond as a defense against the anxiety of subjectivization.94 In the political childhood the Revolution represented, Palloy’s objects, potentially used in children’s play, as one image suggests (fig. 59), might be seen to alleviate the anxiety of separation by proffering a temporary means to accommodate the distinction between self and other, between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived. The transitional object, once discarded, is not forgotten or repressed but remains as a symbol. Read in these terms, the “subjective omnipotence” created by the mother’s satisfaction of the infant’s needs and the ensuing anxiety caused by the experience of “objective reality” (Winnicott’s terms) could be mapped onto the shift from the certainty of life lived under absolutism to the hesitant self-determination of life under the Revolution.

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Figure 59 Attaque de la petite Bastille, ca. 1789. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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Such broad applications, however, threaten to draw us away from the specificity of Palloy’s work and, depending on a problematic psychologization of historical change, they risk homogenizing and pathologizing multiple subjectivities under a single overarching rubric. Palloy’s pulverized stones were not always received as he wanted them to be, and occasionally they were refused outright. Palloy’s practice aimed to provide a universal model for comprehending how the Revolution’s changes to time were rooted in material things, but it realized the possibility of encounters with these things that were inevitably subjective. Responses to the objects may have been different, but Palloy’s intent was consistent: to impress an indelible image of the past on the revolutionary present and to remake the Bastille as a series of objects whose obdurate materiality would function as a point of reference for multiple emotional and intellectual responses. Palloy’s objects repeated, time and again, the form of the Bastille, making whole that which had disappeared, and mediating the historical and psychic breach effected by the destruction of the prison. That which gave the Revolution power, the destruction of the Bastille, figured as a problem, for with no material presence there would be no recall, no history. At the same time this reconstitution was celebratory, signifying a reallocation of value, the transformation of the Bastille into a symbol of revolutionary origins and Ancien-Régime desuetude, and, perhaps, a shift in the relations of power and class that were both generated and produced by that transition. The dematerialization of the Bastille, whose authority was based on a discourse of immovability and mass, and its

reappearance, shrunken, multiplied yet still present, sees Palloy approach the territory of a magician, recalling Marcel Mauss’s elision of difference between technique and ritual, artist and magician. For Mauss, a primary attribute of the magician is a belief in his or her ability to double, to split and repeat.95 In an age of rationalism, Palloy’s own status as magician was deferred instead onto the sympathetic partobjects he produced. As Mauss outlined, to gift something is to give a part of oneself and, indeed, we might certainly consider Palloy’s gifted stones an assimilation of his own manipulated personality, an incorporation that might, at a stretch, be considered a phenomenon of fraternity. Although the repetition of the Bastille’s form directed the interpretation of Palloy’s models, they are far from straightforward objects, operating as they do at the interstices of materiality and lack, presence and absence, theatricality and high seriousness, attached irrevocably to the logic of the monument that they deny at the same time. “Every copy,” George Kubler writes, “has adhesive properties, by holding together the present and the past.”96 Palloy’s mediated Bastille stones and souvenirs are situated in between sculpture and architecture, between the archaic past and the revolutionary present, as “precious debris” (in the deputy Tallien’s words) that spoke to the future.97 Creating a dialogue between past and present that made forgetting impossible and magically visualizing that which was no longer visible, Palloy’s work made possible the contemporaneity and futurity of the Bastille, by attacking performatively an earlier model of the future and by figuring its ephemerality as the sign of a fragile modernity.

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CHAPTER FIVE

MATERIAL FUTURES MARKING TIME IN A REVOLUTIONARY ALMANAC

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The work, the process, the manner and the effort of the effect obtained, escape and hide with him; that which he engraves, the scenes he jots on the copper, has the lightness, the spurt of a brush [. . .] the gay effects of the day, the spirit, the sparkling, the prettiness and the vivaciousness of touch, he creates them and he scatters them across his plate with the looseness of impasto and the splashed vivacity of a gouache, so well that the illusion is complete and that his engraving—look at it there framed on a wall—it is no longer for you an engraving; your eyes think they are entertained by a drawing, and even see in the proof something of the artist’s hand. EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT L’art du dix-huitième siècle

What does history look like? What about the present? And the future? As Palloy’s practice demonstrates, in the early 1790s these were questions facing not only the legislators responsible for reimagining political and cultural life in an unprecedented revolution but also artists who attempted to give their answers form. This chapter takes a slightly different tack from the preceding ones, in that it sets out to explore how a single albeit widely reproduced image, Philibert-Louis Debucourt’s 1790 design for an Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (fig. 60), navigated the complex relationship between material facture, revolutionary politics, and changing conceptions of time. This work will not be considered in isolation, however, for not only does it speak to a range of other issues and images, it also brings together with remarkable efficiency the subjects of the previous chapters, combining references to assignats, revolutionary festivals, the writing of “Revolution” in the blank spaces of a document, the incorporation of citizens of color in the French body politic, and Palloy’s

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Bastille relics. Examining the intersections of these themes in this work, I suggest that Debucourt’s print might be read as providing a particularly self-conscious reflection on the relationships between different media and on the potential of images to mediate the Revolution itself. This work is familiar to historians of French revolutionary visual culture as one of the many images produced in 1790s France that juxtaposed and merged new revolutionary symbols with a range of inherited iconographies and traditional formats. The print’s technical virtuosity was recognized by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who pronounced it—in what remains one of the most sustained meditations on Debucourt’s work—“one of the most artistic of all revolutionary images.”1 This description highlights the intentionality at the heart of Debucourt’s practice, yet in many ways Debucourt’s apparent “art” gives the impression of standing in opposition to the subject matter of his image, which assembles an ostensibly candid representation of daily life in the first years of the Revolution, an explicit reference to an ephemeral and quotidian information economy, and an overt articulation of a new social and temporal order, corroborated by the responses of multiple witnesses. Furthermore, although it is actually a very highly finished single-sheet print, distributed to a politically aware urban clientele, Almanach national is presented as belonging to a genre of print culture, the almanac, which was aimed, for the most part, at a popular and predominantly rural audience. Clearly, this work should not be taken at face value. The print is dominated by a fictional allegorical design rendered in trompe l’oeil and set in an unidentified wooded landscape. Despite its overt illusionism, this device appears to be a tangible structure of some kind, although it could be solidly architectonic or flimsily theatrical. It is juxtaposed with scenes in the print’s lower third that, while powerfully symbolic, are notionally drawn from everyday life under the

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Figure 60 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution, 1790. Colored aquatint and etching. Archives Nationales, Paris, AE/ II/3706. Photo: Atelier Photographique des Archives Nationales

Revolution. A female newspaper vendor hawks her wares in the left-hand corner, children play at soldiers, and an aristocratic couple departs the scene in disgust. Less plausibly, an international crowd, including an “Indian” and a “Turk,” identified by their clothing and in the text at the base of the print, accompany a Frenchman and an Englishman in fraternal embrace, who are admiring the revolutionary sentiments inscribed on the monument.2 As the title of the print implies, Almanach national nods toward a nominal functionality, as a guide to the year to come. It also serves as an elaborate frame for a printed calendar, which could in due course be glued onto the empty “marble” rectangle reserved at the center of the composition. This work foregrounds “paper” and “stone” as its primary subjects and conceptualizes the relationship between them. In addition, it forces us to think about the connections between painting, printing, and writing. Almanach national speaks to the Goncourt brothers’ evocation of Debucourt’s skill in obscuring the signs of his artistic labor and in destabilizing the boundaries between different media to the extent that the viewer is tricked into seeing the gestural effects of the artist’s hand at work in the image, as if it were a drawing rather than the result of a compound mechanical process. The everyday themes of the artist’s work are offset by its material ambiguity. For the Goncourts, nothing is as it seems in Debucourt’s work. Print simulates painting, watercolor, drawing, pastel, gouache, even clothing— his handling of texture is compared to Caspar Netscher’s treatment of fabric in paint. Almanach national is a work that functions as a condensed meditation on the nature of materiality and representation in revolutionary France, at a moment when debates about such subjects were becoming increasingly significant.3 It asks what kind of medium is appropriate for revolution and at what stage in its development, thereby portraying the Revolution as embedded in historical process and projecting imaginatively ahead toward its future life.

The different temporalities of printed paper, stone, and bronze as well as of writing, printing, painting, and object making are all linked in Debucourt’s print, in ways not always easy to determine, to shifts in understanding the Revolution’s past, present, and future. In Almanach national, “stone” seems to stand for the future of the Revolution and “printed newspapers” its present, although the two occupy the same time-space and are situated in dialogic conversation with one another and with the medium in which they are made present. While I am persuaded by W. J. T. Mitchell’s argument that “the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous,” I am also convinced that this heterogeneity is not equally distributed.4 Indeed, Mitchell himself has recognized how “this conclusion does not lead to the impossibility of distinguishing one medium from another. What it makes possible is a more precise differentiation of mixtures. If all media are mixed media, they are not all mixed in the same way.” This formulation increases the range of ways in which a medium might be “specific,” at the same time acknowledging that the specificity of a medium is not located in a “singular, elemental essence.”5 Debucourt’s image insists on the specificity of media, but it shows us how variable and interwoven their permutations might be.

Painting into Print Although Debucourt is cited frequently in discussions of eighteenth-century French genre painting and color printmaking, and despite the fact that Almanach national sometimes crops up as an illustration in histories of the Revolution, the literature on this artist’s work and career is not extensive, and few contributions have been made to it since the midtwentieth century.6 Debucourt has not been afforded the critical attention accorded to other artists known for their material futures | 121

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illustration of contemporary life, such as Louis-Léopold Boilly.7 More typically, his work is considered in terms of his position within a tradition of technically complex multipleplate color printmaking, epitomized previously by such artists as Charles-Melchior Descourtis and Jean-François Janinet. In large part, Debucourt’s status in art history flows from his decision to renounce painting for printmaking and his increasing neglect of original designs in favor of the production of prints after other artists. Whereas in his early printed work Debucourt had been notable for basing his prints on his own paintings and drawings, in later life he mostly reproduced the work of other artists, including Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, Hippolyte Lecomte, and David Wilkie. A former pupil of the sculptor Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain and later Joseph-Marie Vien—albeit for a very brief period prior to the history painter’s relocation to Rome in 1775 to take up a role as director of the French Academy—Debucourt had enjoyed some success as a painter of genre scenes until the mid-1780s.8 Influenced by the Dutch school, Debucourt’s work, shown at the Salons of 1781, 1783, and 1785, invited comparison with Teniers, although critical responses were mixed.9 One anonymous reviewer, describing the Vue de la halle shown in 1783, noted how “the composition of it is entertaining, but doesn’t one find reproachful some touches of black and white a bit too close to one another?” This extended a criticism made two years earlier by Louis-Henri Lefébure, who commented that “it is true that the general tone is a little black and white.”10 Even at this early stage, Debucourt’s painting, with its limited tonal range, was behaving like print, while later his prints became renowned for the manner in which they imitated the painter’s palette. In fact, by the time of the 1783 Salon, Debucourt had already begun to train as a color printmaker, and he published his first engraving, Suzette mal cachée, ou les amants découverts, in 1785.11 Debucourt’s shifts in media are telling, pointing to a mobility that is

reflected in the subjects of his art, and, if the Goncourts are to be believed, the traces of Debucourt’s previous practice appear to infiltrate his prints. Debucourt became known for his skill in a variety of printmaking methods, often, as with Almanach national, combining several techniques in the same design. His work satisfied a late eighteenth-century taste for highly worked multiple-plate color prints after well-known Rococo paintings and genre scenes (so-called printed paintings) whose client base the Revolution largely eliminated.12 Nevertheless, regardless of the increasingly anachronistic status of this kind of printmaking and despite the paradox that the same Revolution that formed the subject matter of prints such as Almanach national was also rendering his hard-won technique outmoded, Debucourt continued to work throughout the Revolution and Empire, adapting swiftly to a new political climate.13 Indeed, the downward mobility implied by Debucourt’s move from painting to printmaking was not as straightforward as it may appear, for whereas many printmakers found the period of the 1790s economically challenging, it provided a range of new opportunities for those willing to engage with the new markets that emerged after 1789. Debucourt’s decision also speaks to a broader reevaluation of hierarchies of medium and genre that occurred during the revolutionary years. Its title notwithstanding, it is likely that Almanach national was aimed primarily at a Parisian print market, although it certainly aimed to materialize and monumentalize the idea of a genuinely national consensus by way of its self-conscious allusion to the oath to the fatherland sworn at the Festival of the Federation on 14 July 1790. One clue to a possible intended audience is given by the dedication “aux amis de la Constitution,” indicating that it may have been made for the Société des Amis de la Constitution, the powerful political club that had begun to meet in Paris at the former Jacobin

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convent on the rue Saint-Honoré in November 1789, formally changing its name from the Société de la Révolution in January 1790, exactly one year before the release of Debucourt’s print.14 As Philippe Bordes has maintained with reference to the Société’s sponsorship of Jacques-Louis David’s Serment du jeu de paume, it is difficult to deduce an explicitly Jacobin sentiment from such commissions.15 In late 1790 the Tennis Court Oath at Versailles articulated themes of fraternity and consensus that crossed party lines and should not therefore, Bordes asserts, be read as indicating a putative Jacobinism on David’s behalf but rather as signaling his financial acumen and ability to foster powerful connections.16 In arguing for the pervasive currency of similar oath imagery at this time, Bordes briefly cites Almanach national, in which the oath of the putti on the monument is echoed by the Frenchman’s fraternal embrace of his English companion in the right-hand foreground.17 David’s unfinished painting and Debucourt’s print map a cross-media interest in oath-taking that had been initiated by David’s 1784 Oath of the Horatii before entering political discourse at the tennis court at Versailles and being reproduced performatively at the Festival of the Federation. It is quite possible that Debucourt, in dedicating his print to the “amis de la Constitution,” hoped for similar patronage. The membership of the Société was composed for the most part of middle-class professionals, and membership dues were fairly expensive. An image such as this was in tune with the fraternal language of late 1790 and would have been well within the financial reach of the Société’s elite members. Although described by Maurice Vaucaire as “a brave bourgeois, son of a bourgeois, having no other goal than to live in a bourgeois manner,” Debucourt’s finances were precarious and it seems certain that his turn to the production of color prints was intended as a way of maximizing profit on his artistic designs and reproductions.18 Debucourt’s dedication, I suggest, represented more an attempt to garner the support of

powerful economic interests than an overt statement of the artist’s political allegiance.

Print as Prolepsis In the words of Lynn Hunt, “a new relationship to time was the most significant change, and perhaps the defining development, of the French Revolution.”19 This development, however, rather than proceeding uniformly, changed with each decisive adjustment to the organization of political power. Almanach national represented an attempt to negotiate the new time frame that had emerged after 1789, when the “time of Liberty” rendered previous models of temporal organization untenable. It could not, however, anticipate the future course of the Revolution, despite its prognostic claims, nor the later replacement of the Gregorian calendar by the Republican calendar in October 1793. The secular Republican calendar, designed by Charles-Gilbert Romme, divided the year into twelve months comprised of three equal ten-day weeks, or décades, with each tenth day or décadi replacing Sunday as a day of rest.20 Each day was divided into ten hours, each hour into one hundred minutes, and each minute into one hundred seconds. Although the Republican calendar lasted until 1 January 1806, decimal time was formally ended in 1795.21 Each month was named (by Philippe Fabre d’Églantine) after the French climate or agriculture, while each day had an animal, tool, plant, or mineral associated with it, replacing the saint’s days and religious festivals of the Gregorian calendar with natural phenomena. As Eviatar Zerubavel has pointed out, calendrical reform revealed that the traditional calendar, accepted unquestioningly as valid, “was a mere social artifact and by no means unalterable.”22 Zerubavel does not fail to note the potential “boomerang effect” of such a stripping away of artifice, which potentially exposed the new calendar as equally arbitrary and contrived. The recourse to material futures | 123

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nature in the naming of the months and days constituted a strategy to anchor the calendar with an authority derived from essential laws that predated the Revolution, to which it was returning after centuries of royal and religious contingency masquerading as unchanging tradition. This return to origins sits alongside the idea of a revolutionary breach with the past as the Revolution’s central dialectic, a “primal past” invoked in the service of the future, in the character of a Benjaminian wish image.23 Indeed, for Walter Benjamin, the Republican calendar was symptomatic of the Revolution’s explosion of the “continuum of history.”24 “The initial day of a calendar,” as Benjamin evocatively described it, “serves as a historical time-lapse camera,” returning repeatedly in the form of holidays and commemorative events.25 Certainly the Republican calendar reordered not only future time but historical time too, charging it with the “time of the now.”26 The institution of the Republican calendar insisted on the status of all time that preceded it as distanced, objectively past history, rather than a continuous prelude to the present moment. However, the designers of the calendar extended it proleptically to 22 September 1792, the date of the declaration of the Republic, more than a year before the calendar’s actual implementation. Time that had been lived in the Republic but not according to the Republican calendar was retrospectively rearranged as year I. The revolutionary reorganization of the days and weeks of the year into “rational” decimal units reflected an increasing regularization of time that marked the early stages of the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy and effected a far-reaching though hardly uncontested move away from traditional ways of organizing official and personal temporality.27 Arguing for the new calendar’s cultural impact, Matthew Shaw has pointed out that “the history of the calendar is therefore not just a history of administration, or of measurement, but also of the ways in which time and timing

helped to provide the structures for community.”28 Furthermore, representations of revolutionary changes in time, in the form of calendars, timepieces, bureaucratic documents, or allegorical paintings, all served a constitutive as well as illustrative function, making real the otherwise abstract alterations in temporal structure. Debucourt’s image appears inevitably to prophesy these changes; in fact, the artist later produced printed representations of the Republican calendar that loosely repeated the compositional arrangement of Almanach national (fig. 61). The print shares much, iconographically, with other images from the period that deal with similar issues. For example, in La Constitution française, a color aquatint from 1791 (fig. 62), we see an invented monument supported by Bastille stones and decorated with the names of legislators; the constitution in the process of being “written”; militarized revolutionary children; a revolutionary family; and an exotic, turbaned onlooker.29 It seems probable that Lecoeur, the artist responsible for this image, had been influenced by Debucourt’s earlier example. However, despite evident similarities, Almanach national is distinct in its overt references to the culture of almanacs and to the Revolution’s effects on time. Although Almanach national does not propose an official recalibration of time as such, it makes explicit, irrefutable reference to the novelty of the Revolution, as an unimagined event that has altered irrevocably the cycle of history. In this context, the intended presence of the calendar has value as a sign not of the first year of the Republic but, in terms that the citizens of 1791 would have understood, of the third year of Liberty. The simultaneously proleptic and prognostic character of the image and its awareness of the overlapping time frames the Revolution set in play are enhanced by its self-identification as an almanac, a well-established form of engaging with past and future time that anticipated in several important examples the later innovations of the Republican calendar.30

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Figure 61 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Calendrier républicain, 1794. Aquatint and etching. British Museum, London. Photo © Trustees of the British Museum Figure 62 Louis Lecoeur, La Constitution française, 1791. Colored aquatint. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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These printed texts contained diverse predictions concerning the year ahead; various statistics and narratives relating to past events; astrological and meteorological forecasts; and a range of often unrelated material, from accounts of monstrous births, religious liturgy, or royal genealogy to satirical advice on the best gambling houses in Paris.31 Almanacs were frequently specialized according to trade or local interest. Aimed at a wide range of audiences and social milieus, they occupied a prominent role in the domestic life of eighteenth-century subjects as, alongside the Bible or literature distributed by religious confraternities, one of the most widely available and readily consulted forms of printed text. For Jacques-Charles Bailleul, author of an Almanach des bizarreries humaines, the almanac operated as a substitute for memory and as a practical guide for daily life: “The goal of an almanac [. . .] is to ease the memory of he who uses it. In this way, he remembers what day he did such a thing; he sees what he should do today; he determines what he should do another such day. An almanac is thus a companion at every moment.”32 Often printed in enormous runs and distributed door-to-door by itinerant colporteurs, many almanacs, in their popular forms, were dominated by the replication of cyclical events and did not change substantially during the Revolution. A bafflingly extensive range of traditional almanacs did not seem unduly affected by the Revolution, continuing in the same slow-paced vein they had pursued prior to 1789, albeit with some minor changes, such as the shift from regional almanacs that concentrated exclusively on local information to almanacs produced according to the new departmental structure but conveying essentially the same kind of information.33 This made almanacs subject to criticism from revolutionaries who viewed as suspect their reproduction of irrational “medieval” knowledge.34 Nonetheless, the Revolution also gave birth to new genres of political or historical almanacs, which were increas-

ingly used for explicitly propagandistic purposes.35 As early as 1788, Sylvain Maréchal’s Almanach des honnêtes gens had restructured the year into twelve equal months and substituted “honest people”—philosophers, writers, and scientists—for the saints of the Gregorian calendar, predating by several years the innovations of the Republican calendar and leading to Maréchal’s imprisonment.36 The pervasiveness of almanacs was such that in September 1791 the Jacobin Club announced a prize of twenty-five louis for the best patriotic almanac (a competition won by Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois’s Almanach du Père Gérard ) in order to “regenerate” an area of print culture that had the potential to impact dramatically upon the everyday experience of the Revolution.37 As Sanja Perovic has argued, the Republican calendar later encountered problems in being received as a “universal” representation of time precisely because it had emerged from a polemical almanac tradition in which different almanacs were associated with rival political groups.38 This is the context in which Almanach national emerged in late 1790.39 Although, as Shaw has observed, by the late eighteenth century most almanacs were “structured around the idea of a calendar” and despite a diversity of socioeconomic applications that saw many highly expensive almanacs being produced, the use-value of Debucourt’s image as an almanac was limited, as it is clearly of a higher quality than the majority of almanacs circulating in France during the period—more a demonstration of Debucourt’s printmaking skill than a compendium of useful information for the next twelve months.40 As a single-sheet print, it makes no allowance for the wealth of material that could traditionally be contained in this format, presenting instead primarily textual information in visual form. That said, Almanach national is not just an exercise in technical accomplishment, nor does it fail to imply any sense of the futurity typical of the conventional almanac, although it does reinterpret the dependence on past models that animated the almanacs’

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Figure 63 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of upper section), 1790. Colored aquatint and etching. Archives Nationales, Paris, AE/II/3706. Photo: Atelier Photographique des Archives Nationales

predictions. Furthermore, while it was clearly not unique among almanacs in attempting to foster revolutionary sentiment, the manner in which it did so was. This print, couched loosely in a well-established form but explicitly revolutionary, reconfigures the cycles of royal and religious information that characterized almanacs, and it embodies the radical reconsideration of time that accompanied the Revolution’s renegotiation of the grounds of political authority.41 The figures in Almanach national point toward a future that has yet to be put into place but that takes power from its very provisionality, the in-betweeness of its represented structures and Debucourt’s own intermedial practice marking a crucial difference from Ancien-Régime temporal and political continuities.42

The Space of Time “Monuments,” in the words of Robert Harbison, “are more or less monstrous exaggerations of the requirement that architecture be permanent,” yet Almanach national aspires to a form of monumentality that plays at permanence without succumbing

to its oppressive logic.43 Commemorating the Revolution’s achievements to date, the image simultaneously creates a free space for the development of a revolutionary politics. The center of the print is dominated by a large, polychrome marble frame, divisible horizontally into two distinct halves.44 The upper section of this structure contains a bronze bas-relief dominated by a seated, militarized Minerva figure representing the National Assembly, enthroned on a chair whose legs are comprised of bound fasces topped with a liberty cap (fig. 63). At Minerva’s feet sit a globe and a copy of Rousseau’s Social Contract. To her left is a cube, a symbol of equality, bearing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and she is busily engaged in engraving the new constitution on a large tablet. This print of a (possibly painted) bronze image of a piece of stone being engraved (or written on?) sets the uncertain tone of the image as a whole. At the same time, a play of depth is enacted between the aquatint plate’s textured surface, the three-dimensionality of the “stone,” the bas-relief of the “bronze,” and the flatness of the paper. Although the monument’s “realism” and its attachment to the pavement on

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Figure 64 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération, 1790. Oil on panel. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/The Bridgeman Art Library

which the children play lend it a concreteness and sense of occupying a certain space and time, it is nonetheless purposefully irresolute.45 At the right-hand side of this section, where the image appears to break down into “painterly” effect, a group of armed putti, embodying the newly formed eighty-three départements, swear an oath—Horatii-style—against a backdrop of Federative flags similar to those employed at the festival of 14 July 1790. On the left-hand side of the image, another cherub lights a bonfire of Ancien-Régime symbols: heraldic shields, sealed documents, a copy of the notorious livre rouge, and chains and a castellated fragment from the Bastille.46 The border of this scene, in a “marble” darker than that used in the central panel, is topped by a swagged portrait of Louis XVI, and plaques engraved with the names of prominent members of the Assembly run down the sides.47 Beneath the plaques, on either side of the monument, the texts of two key speeches by the king flank the monument. These speeches, the discours of 15 July 1789 and 4 February 1790, marked crucial stages in the consolidation of revolutionary power.48 Although the reception of the king as constitutional monarch was, in late 1790, relatively positive, his representation here appears somewhat perfunctory (it is, quite literally, marginal), and by the middle of the next year, his reputation had deteriorated drastically. Louis is shown facing in the opposite direction to the principal figures in the image, and it is tempting to find a parallel to his portrait in the features of the disgruntled aristocrat exiting stage-left, his hat raised in front of his face to obscure the sight of the new revolutionary subjects that surround him. Louis’s portrait is essentially that which appeared on revolutionary paper money until 1792; its presence here lends an uncertain authenticity to a monument that itself existed only in paper form. The monument carries the names of the members of the National Constituent Assembly, but not long after the image’s

creation, several of these legislators were replaced, discredited, or elevated, bringing to mind Henri Lefebvre’s insight that “although the monument is always laden with symbols, it presents them to social awareness and contemplation (passive) just when those symbols, already outdated, are beginning to lose their meaning.”49 In late 1790, when Almanach national was produced, relative optimism prevailed and hopes of consensus were still plausible, but the events of 1791, the year of Almanach national’s intended calendar—from the king’s flight to Varennes in June to the massacre on the Champ de Mars in July and the Declaration of Pillnitz in August, when European powers prepared to intervene if Louis XVI was threatened—soon changed this mood. By September the Constitution of 1791 had been proclaimed, and the National Constituent Assembly held its last session on 30 September. Purging all signs of the past, even the revolutionary past, the Assembly voted that none of its members could stand for election to the next legislature, the Legislative Assembly, which held its first session on 1 October 1791. The “engraving” of the names of members of the National Assembly on the print’s “monument” thus occurred in anticipation of the institution’s obsolescence, emphasizing the accelerated timescale that renders the materiality of this monument uncertain. Few symbols are more illustrative of the interpenetration of past and present in this print than the Bastille stones. Their presence is reiterated in the descriptive text at the base of the image, in which the artist confirms that the figure of Minerva is indeed seated on the “debris” of the prison. Certainly this segment of the image might be seen as supporting MarieJoseph Chénier’s contemporary proposal, in a hymn performed to music by François-Joseph Gossec at the Festival of the Federation, that “we engrave on the debris of these formidable towers the account of combat, the exploits of the conquerors, the laws of our empire, and the respectable names of our primary legislators.”50 The use of engraving in this

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declaration as a metaphor for understanding revolutionary process resonates with Romme’s announcement in September 1793 that “time opens a new book of history; and in its new course, majestic and simple like equality, it must engrave with a new and vigorous burin the annals of a regenerated France.”51 By the time Almanach national was published, a rhetoric of transformation and reuse had of course been well established in the form of Palloy’s “Bastilles.” Furthermore, Debucourt’s image should undoubtedly be considered in the context of the recent Federative celebrations, and Debucourt produced his own image of the Préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération (fig. 64), showing the altar under construction.52 The revolutionary festival provided an ideal format with which to imagine time, as its various structures were broken down, remodeled, and reused. One print titled Montagne élevée au champ de la réunion pour la fête de l’Être Suprême le 20 prairial l’an 2eme (fig. 65) is explicit in this regard. The image represents the plaster and wood “mountain” that dominated the Robespierrist Festival of the Supreme

Being in 1794 constructed around the frame of the altar for the 1790 Paris Festival of the Federation that is so clearly visible in Debucourt’s painting. At its base, the print features a detailed calendar for year III, which also related the new cycle of revolutionary festivals that the Festival of the Supreme Being was intended to inaugurate but that, following the downfall of the Jacobins, never came to pass. Festivals and the images that portrayed the vanished objects and events as if they were permanent fluctuated between the commemoration of past events and the public announcement of the advent of a radically new stage in revolutionary political life. As I have argued, their architectural installations mirrored this ambivalence for, though short-lived and theatrical, they pretended to a monumentality that revolutionaries had neither the time nor money to render in more solid materials. The illusionistic monument pointed always toward a future that remained to be fulfilled, admitting the prospect of the Revolution’s continuance. The rhetoric of 1790 was all about completion of the revolutionary process,

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Figure 65 Montagne élevée au champ de la réunion pour la fête de l’Être Suprême le 20 prairial l’an 2eme, 1794. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France Figure 66 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of pamphlet seller), 1790. Colored aquatint and etching. Archives Nationales, Paris, AE/II/3706. Photo: Atelier Photographique des Archives Nationales

about fraternity and oaths of togetherness, yet this was underscored by a sense of futurity and commemoration in the name of achievements to come—for what else is an oath if not a projection into the future? As has been suggested, the impermanence of the revolutionary festival in 1790 therefore had potentially positive connotations, which are rearticulated in Debucourt’s Almanach national, where the eternal is invoked with a tacit awareness of its provisionality, justifying the Revolution’s ongoing work.

Figures of Modernity Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Almanach national is the scene in the left-hand foreground, where a seated female figure sells the numerous revolutionary pamphlets and newspapers that had inundated the market since 1789, alongside a range of tricolor cockades and other insignia of patriotism (fig. 66).53 Visible are the titles Chronique de Paris, Journal du Soir, l’Ami de la Révolution, Discours de Mirabeau, and Le Patriote François, par Brissot—journals that collectively comprised the “speaking flag,” “paper tribune,” or “dense and cloudy whirlwind of words and ideas” eulogized by the Goncourts in a long excursus on newspapers, pamphlets, and caricatures.54 This scene, adapted from the stock picturesque types of the Cris de Paris, was clearly of interest to contemporary viewers of the print.55 Camille Desmoulins stated that it would be “his

almanac” and expressed his admiration for the print in Révolutions de France et de Brabant, his own newspaper, but admonished Debucourt for not including his publication in the sheaf of pamphlets on display.56 Through her pose, her headgear, and the document raised in her left hand, this figure invites direct comparison with the embodiment of Minerva that dominates the image. Indeed, at one level, Minerva may be read as a monumental figuration of the newspaper vendor’s future, articulated in more durable materials. The comparison does not, however, imply equivalence, for the newspaper vendor is parergon to the allegory’s ergon, both part of and outside the frame that is loosely constituted by the architecture: the vendor is necessarily that which the image of Minerva must not become and that which subverts its inviolable order.57 Rather, this scenario pictures a chain of production and dissemination. As the National Assembly, in the form of Minerva, engraves the wise words of the constitution, they filter down to the street, where they are disseminated by the vendor, who has at her feet the printed output of the royalist and counterrevolutionary press, torn to pieces and piled in the gutter.58 Unspoken here is the possibility that these may in fact be revolutionary pamphlets that have become politically undesirable over time, for they appear to have fallen from the patriotic vendor’s stall. Print historian Henri Bouchot compared the figure of Minerva to that which later featured on the material futures | 131

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letterhead of the Institut de France, an elite figure on a paper support.59 In a similar way, the allegory representing the Assembly in the guise of Minerva is reactivated in the person of the newspaper vendor, destabilizing the ostensible “ordinariness” of her placement here. At stake are the competing claims of allegory and “everyday” representation to transmit revolutionary “truth.” Seen alone, the allegory risks failing to convey adequately the message of the Revolution to an audience unfamiliar with its classical idiom, while the newspaper vendor is too loaded with the negative associations of the everyday and consequently seen as more temporary than eternal. As Jacques Rancière has noted recently, describing a model of thought that he identifies as permeating novelistic writing, Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, and Benjamin’s theory of history, “the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure.”60 The newspaper vendor is, I suggest, such a “phantasmagoric figure,” framed in Debucourt’s print so as to absorb the signifying power of the allegory, displacing it to a realm that stands for the true, even as it occupies a space defined by transience. Debucourt’s street vendor and the allegory of Minerva are placed in dialogue with one another, translating each other within their respective frames of reference, and the newspaper vendor consequently becomes no more “ordinary” than Minerva. An image by Debucourt from 1791, La croisée (fig. 67), demonstrates how the staging of the female allegory at the center of Almanach national and her plebian parallel in the newspaper vendor had counterparts in the artist’s work at this time. The work, a pendant to La rose mal défendue of the same year, had initially featured the central woman’s young lover passing her a letter through the open window while her elderly husband looked on, oblivious, indoors. This scene of cuckoldry was altered in subsequent states of the print, two children replacing the young man and effectively neutralizing

the print’s message.61 The play of seduction that animates La croisée seems a world apart from the high-minded ambitions of Debucourt’s other revolutionary works, although it is similar in tone to his well-known and somewhat critical scenes of dissolute bourgeois sociability at the Palais-Royal in the 1790s, such as the Rowlandsonesque La promenade publique.62 Nonetheless, key elements of the scene bear comparison with Almanach national, revealing the potential for a work such as Almanach national to challenge simplistic polarizations, derived from revolutionary rhetoric itself, between the fraudulent prerogatives of prerevolutionary artistic practice and its “authentic” revolutionary replacement. The theme of duplicity, familiar across Debucourt’s work at this time, is displaced from La croisée’s adulterous

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Figure 67 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, La croisée, 1791. Colored aquatint. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: RMN/Gérard Blot Figure 68 Jean-Germain Drouais, Soldat romain blessé, 1785. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo: RMN/ Daniel Arnaudet

exchanges to Almanach national’s duplicitous modes of representation. Almanach national erodes the fine boundary between duplicity and duplication, reproducing visually the inscriptive surfaces and seated pose of the central female figures and animating their relationship across a pictorial surface that indulges a play of truth and deception. It is worth noting in this context that, as an artist who frequently made pendant works, Debucourt was more than aware of the potential for comparison between different prints. That the duplication in Almanach national shifts between allegorical and “everyday” representations would not have been without its problems; in the misogynist cultural framework of the Revolution, the dignity of the National Assembly as an ideal (male) representative body would have been threatened by the parallel with a “real” woman, no matter how impeccable her revolutionary credentials. As has been noted, such substitutions reached a critical position with the use of an actress from the Opéra, the wife of the printer Antoine-François Momoro, as an all too literal and consequently widely condemned stand-in for Reason at the eponymous Festival of Reason held in Notre Dame in the winter of 1793. Of course, the newspaper vendor is not the only supposedly “ordinary” subject represented in the foreground of the Almanach. The two children illustrate a double fantasy

of ideal infancy. The gesturing child on the left appears the more straightforward of the two, a sentimental paragon of Rousseauesque instruction linking the maternal vendor to the new calendar. The boy in military uniform, on the other hand, figures as an eerie (but undoubtedly more cheerful) premonition of the Jacobin cult of the child martyr Joseph Bara, whose heroic demise Debucourt himself represented in a print of 1794. The taut, reclining pose of the child in Almanach national seems to explicitly invoke the motif of stoic death central to neoclassical painting at this time, most obviously in Jean-Germain Drouais’s Soldat romain blessé of 1785 (fig. 68), exhibited at the same Salon as a number of Debucourt’s works and later reprised in ephebic form in Jacques-Louis David’s La mort de Joseph Bara (see fig. 2).63 Moreover, both the Soldat romain blessé and the reclining child in Debucourt’s image are modeled on an antique archetype, the Dying Gaul, while the standing child may be based loosely on the Rondanini Faun. Both of these marble sculptures would have been well known to Debucourt, who had received sculptural training early in his career. Whether an artistic in-joke, an attempt to raise the aesthetic value of his image, or an allusion to past French heroism in the figure of the Gaul, these sculptural references confirm Debucourt’s interest in the relationships between media and in the intersection of different temporalities.

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In the corner of the image, two grotesque, disaffected aristocrats departing the scene on the left-hand side are clearly demarcated by their age, their preposterous clothing, and their distorted, overstuffed, and pinched features. This pair forms a sharp contrast with the peaceable and pleasing appearance of the revolutionary couple they face. The young revolutionary, so engrossed in his pamphlet that he fails even to notice their passing, exemplifies the political virtue of reading. This mockery of the aristocracy is offset by a utopian inclusiveness exemplified in the figures on the right-hand side of the print (fig. 69). An Englishman and a Frenchman, their arms around one another’s shoulders in a fraternal embrace that recalls imagery of the three estates in accord, popular during 1789 and 1790, explain the monument before them to a group of awestruck foreign onlookers, including figures whom Debucourt identifies in the text as an “Indian” and a “Turk.” The invocation of this global perspective, couched as it is in deeply condescending terms, attempts to predict the spatial as well as temporal effects of the Revolution. While the vertical axis of Almanach national marks the dissemination of information from unstable ideal allegory of state to everyday mass-media consumption, so the horizontal plane outlines the transition from the old regime, leaving to the left, to the new global Revolution being introduced at the right. Claiming to reject the past, except in forms so archaic that they became modern, revolutionaries situated themselves always on the brink of the new. This contingency has been typically understood as exemplary of modernity and its production of multiple pasts in the name of the nation-state, civilization, or history, yet it is also precisely indicative of the condition of globalization, as a historical phenomenon that foregrounds what Seteney Shami has described as an irresolute “almost/not yet world.”64 The international crowd on the right-hand side of Almanach national mirror the printed pamphlets on sale on the left as representative of a Revolution preoccupied by its own reproduction.

Marking Time In the bottom half of the central monument in Debucourt’s print, flanked by engraved accounts of the king’s speeches to the Assembly in February 1790, is a striking expanse of blank “stone” (fig. 70), deliberately left empty so as to accommodate a printed calendar for 1791, which could be pasted onto the Almanach. However, it is not quite empty, for this space is filled with an extraordinary, calligraphic rendering of the veining of marble and the scratches and blemishes produced by its cutting, which exceeds mere resemblance, functioning instead as an uncertain, experimental territory that gives the impression of prioritizing mark-making for its own sake. Counteracting the painstaking mechanical rendering of other media elsewhere in the print, these marks seem to refer directly to the body of the artist, and the slanted angle of the marks may even index Debucourt’s apparently right-handed approach, reversed in the printmaking process. The significance of this pale rectangle is alluded to by the fact that two of the figures in the foreground beneath it are pointing up toward the supplementary calendar. Debucourt’s 1794 design for a Calendrier républicain (see fig. 61) gives a good idea of how the presence of the calendar transformed the work (see also fig. 71).65 Although this later image bears the traces of the Revolution’s radicalization, with the institution of Romme’s Republican Calendar and the appearance of more explicitly Jacobin iconography, the execution in grisaille and the dominant female allegory echo the basic formal tropes and subject matter of the upper section of Almanach national. Indeed, the addition of printed text to a preprepared, iconographically dense framework is a conspicuous feature of several other revolutionary images, for instance, the allegorical tables representing the Declaration of the Rights of Man (now on display at the Musée Carnavalet, Paris), where sections of typeset text have been glued to a painted surface.66 Such

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Figure 69 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail showing figures on right-hand side of print), 1790. Colored aquatint and etching. Archives Nationales, Paris, AE/II/3706. Photo: Atelier Photographique des Archives Nationales Figure 70 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of “marble”), 1790. Colored aquatint and etching. Archives Nationales, Paris, AE/II/3706. Photo: Atelier Photographique des Archives Nationales

impositions suggest a certain uneasiness regarding the painted or even printed reproduction of the text of law and a concomitant fetishization of the materiality of the “original” document that is paralleled in the many plans submitted throughout the revolutionary decade for monuments containing legislative documents. Unfortunately, Calendrier républicain was outmoded from the moment of its production, for it contains reference to sansculottides, the supplementary days at the end of the Republican year that had been abolished and replaced by jours complémentaires in August 1794, just one month before Debucourt’s calendar was due to begin.67 It is unclear exactly why Debucourt kept the printed calendar separate from the image; nevertheless, the attention paid to this space, its exchange on the print market in this form, and the use of this strategy elsewhere in his oeuvre combine to counteract the possibility that this image was merely a proof, despite its description as an “avant-propos” in the advertisement for Almanach national that appeared in January 1791 in the Journal de Paris. This advertisement certainly signals that Debucourt imagined the print as an object of everyday use, claiming that it would be “an engraving, which, through its composition is likely to decorate the homes of French citizens.”68 Debucourt’s image appears to

adapt features of a familiar commercial approach to a unique political situation. For instance, we might compare it to a much earlier print such as Claude Gillot’s L’agioteur élevé par la Fortune au plus haut degré de la richesse et de l’abondance, a “progress” of a speculator from lackey to the pillory issued in 1720 at a time of impending financial crisis. In the first state of Gillot’s image the artist left a blank rectangle at the center where a calendar could be pasted, whereas in later states this space was occupied by an allegory of fraud, violence, and cruelty, thus increasing the profitability of the work at each stage in its production.69 It is probable too that Debucourt feared that the specificity of an attached calendar, while enhancing the short-term utility of his image, would limit its durability in the long-term, minimizing its aesthetic value in the process. Almanacs, after all, were nothing if not transient and were widely associated with a low-end, popular audience that Debucourt’s print invokes (in the figure of the newspaper vendor) but from which it is distinct. Moreover, the actual absence of the calendar forces the viewer to engage with other ways of thinking about the passage of time in this print and implicates them in the production of the “final” work. Key to the interpretation of Debucourt’s image is a recognition of the shifts in meaning engendered by variation material futures | 135

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between different states of the same print.70 At least four different states of Almanach national are known to have existed. Maurice Fenaille, in his meticulous catalogue of Debucourt’s printed work, suggests the existence of an additional state in which the portrait of Louis XVI was replaced by revolutionary symbols, although the whereabouts of this version are unknown.71 The greatest variation occurred between the first and second states of the print. The main difference concerned the addition of text to areas previously left blank. By the second state, the inscription “La Nation, La Loi et Le Roi” had been added to Minerva’s shield, the word “Décret” to the tablet on Minerva’s pedestal, and, most interestingly, the words “Décret pour l’émission des nouveaux assignats” (Decree for the issue of new assignats) had been inscribed on the piece of paper held up by the female newspaper vendor in the left-hand foreground (fig. 71). The Goncourts were clearly looking at the second or third state of the print when they described the vendor as in the process of announcing this new release of assignats.72 Of course, assignats were themselves complex framed allegories that represented a transformation of materials, for they signified both the metamorphosis of clerical land into revolutionary sign and the transposition of metal currency into paper. The irresolution so strikingly apparent in the blank tablets and open spaces of early editions of the print is curtailed in subsequent states, where the addition of text fixes their meaning. Yet the appearance of writing on the blank document between the first and second states suggests that the transmission of information between the allegory of Minerva writing the laws and the newspaper vendor who circulates them was an ongoing, dynamic process, marking Almanach national as a site for the production of revolutionary meaning. Such a process speaks to the print’s exploitation of the political value of provisionality, the monument and the document operating as screens on which a range of new

meanings might come to be inscribed. It might even, alongside the addition of the papier collé calendar, be read as a commentary on the nature of the medium of print itself, whose simulation of other materials—bronze and marble in particular—posed questions about the integrity of those materials. Since antiquity, marble had been understood in terms of a certain mixing or instability of matter. The geological theories of Aristotle and Theophrastus had suggested that marbles were composed of earthy matter suspended in water, fired into a solid substance by humors deep beneath the earth’s crust.73 Marble was either water metamorphosed into stone or, as several medieval commentators understood it, liquid congealed into a hardened form that was far from stable and was capable of transforming under extreme conditions of cold or heat.74 Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, in his entry on marble in the Encyclopédie, made no such claims, though he stressed its infinite variety in terms of color, finish, and durability.75 In addition, d’Holbach related the various environmental factors that might influence the appearance of the stone and its frequent confusion with other geological substances, and he recounted in detail the procedure for the manufacture of artificial marble and marbled paper.76 Marble, then, was an “open” material that could signify in a range of different forms, whether stone, paint, or paper.77 The presence of the “marble” rectangle at the center of Almanach national, which provides the ground for the ­découpage addition of text, resonates with a procedure familiar to the printmaker. In his Traité élémentaire de l’imprimerie, an alphabetically ordered compendium of technical terms useful to the printmaker, Antoine-François Momoro listed two main connotations under the heading “marbre.”78 Marble signified either a supporting stone that formed an integral part of the printing apparatus, on which one placed the formes containing text or images in order to print from them, or it was a large stone placed on trestles, on which compositors organized and

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Figure 71 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of newspaper vendor, version with calendar attached), 1791. Colored aquatint and etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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Figure 72 Label for Pharmaceutical Goods Sold by L. Chedeville, ca. 1790–1810. Etching and engraving. The Rothschild Collection, Waddesdon Manor, 3686.3.72.160. Photo: University of Central England Digital Services, © The National Trust, Waddesdon Manor

corrected their formes. We might, then, read this empty expanse at the center of a print that Fenaille describes as “one of Debucourt’s most interesting from the point of view of the engraving process” as reflecting directly on the process of printmaking and articulating a commentary on the relationship between the printed image and the represented object.79 This “marble,” like the printer’s marble, was primed to receive a printed text. What is more, Debucourt mobilizes this space, intended to be covered with a calendar, as a site for a graphic exuberance unmatched elsewhere in the print. While the presence of the newspaper vendor clearly expresses a sense of self-referentiality with regard to the dissemination of printed works and while the quotations from painted académies suggest a familiarity with a broad range of artistic practice, the

“marble” even more strikingly confirms Almanach national as a “self-aware image,” an allegory of the act of image making.80 We might read this part of the image productively against other kinds of prints made before and during the Revolution that explicitly brought print and manuscript together in a dynamic relationship with one another. Perhaps most strikingly, pro-forma documents such as passports and certificates, whose empty spaces awaited the written word, shared the Almanach national’s enticement to participate in the “completion” of the image (see, for example, figs. 22 and 32). Contemporary trade cards and commercial labels—for example, a label attached to pharmaceutical goods produced by the Lorient firm of L. Chedeville (fig. 72)—also conflated an idealized imagined architecture with the everyday products

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of trade, framing an empty space within which the details of the product or transaction could be documented by hand.81 This amalgamation of the standardizing qualities of print and context-specific information was paralleled in book illustration as well, particularly bookplates and title pages. As Antony Griffiths has observed, in the early years of the Revolution, book publishing waned in comparison to the explosion in newspapers and the periodical press foregrounded in Almanach national, regaining a foothold in the market only after Thermidor.82 The focus on the exchange and interaction of different kinds of print in Debucourt’s image should undoubtedly be understood in terms of how the new economic realities of the Revolution affected the materiality and commodity status of print itself. This was not the only point in Debucourt’s career when he exploited the motif of the blank frame as a means of maximizing the profit that could be gained from an image by selling separately the parts needed to “complete” the print. His similarly time-themed Cadran républicain de la nouvelle division du jour décretée par la Convention nationale, which illustrated the new division of the day into ten hours, again within an illusionistic marble frame, contained an empty circle at the center to accommodate a round cameo representing a woman in antique garb drawing a circle with a compass on a tablet. His Napoleonic La paix (fig. 73) was an allegorical print sold with or without its striking decorative border, which added four francs to the eight franc price. Divorced from the image at its center, the border operates as a work of art on its own terms and as a site for a range of potential conclusions, limited only by the dimensions of the frame. The presence of such “blanks” in a work forces the viewer into an active engagement with the image.83 Displacing attention onto the interrelation of objects within the image, the empty space directs viewers to reconstitute the narrative by “filling in” the relationship between the determined and the

undetermined, so that they might come to a predetermined conclusion, an empathetic relationship that is, potentially, productive of memory. Certainly, Debucourt’s Almanach national, with its accompanying calendar, suggests that the possibility of such a conclusion is not far away, and like an aestheticized bureaucratic form, its empty spaces provide the viewer with agency as a participant in the image’s production. In its “incomplete” state, the image does, however, operate on its own terms, independent of any later additions, as indicated by the attention given to the rendering of the marble plaque, whose scrawled surface makes further written additions difficult, effectively ensuring that only the correct image will occupy this space. Most intriguingly, this part of the image appears to articulate the erasure of time that was one of the Revolution’s defining features, and it therefore anticipates the radical recalibration of time that the Republican calendar made law. Moreover, with its striking similarity to a funerary monument, it neatly evokes the “pastness” of the previous regime. As Michel de Certeau framed it, “Revolution itself, that ‘modern’ idea, represents the scriptural project at the level of an entire society seeking to constitute itself as a blank page with respect to the past, to write itself by itself (that is, to produce itself as its own system) and to produce a new history (refaire l’histoire) on the model of what it fabricates (and this will be ‘progress’).”84 The “blank page” at the center of Debucourt’s monument presents itself as both a tabula rasa upon which the artist’s scribbled marks figure as a violent, joyous first step prior to the laying down of the calendar and as a radical, iconoclastic deletion—a “striking” of the printer’s plate.

Reproducing Revolution According to German philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck, the late eighteenth century witnessed an acceleration of time that took the form of an “unconscious secularization material futures | 139

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Figure 73 Philibert-Louis Debucourt, La paix. A Bonaparte pacificateur, 1801. Aquatint and etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

of eschatological expectation.”85 As traditional forms of prophecy became replaced by rational political prognosis, so the revolutionary present could no longer be experienced as the present but constantly rushed into the future. The French Revolution marked a move from “revolution” signifying a continuous cycle of repetitious political systems, conceptually derived from the movement of stars outlined by Copernicus and equally impossible to transform by human action, to “Revolution” as a singular irreversible event. “Making” Revolution came under the aegis of human capacity, and as new categories of professional revolutionary emerged, the prospect of Revolution in perpetuity became a reality. The reproduction of Revolution is the central theme of Almanach national, in which the almanac format figures as a site where the temporal effects of the Revolution are made jarringly apparent. Almanacs were based on a form of historical understanding that privileged the documentation of events within a recognizable, repetitive structure, with prophesies of the minor variations to be experienced in the forthcoming

year. In the early years of the Revolution, this structure coexisted alongside the realization of the Revolution’s exceptionality, and almanacs appeared that emphasized the plurality of Revolution, alongside those such as Almanach national that foregrounded its uniqueness.86 Yet ultimately, the naturalistic, transhistorical time that the almanac invoked could not survive intact after 1789, and Almanach national marks an attempt to engage with new ways of imagining the future. The recourse to permanent Revolution is apparent in the invocation of an ongoing global fraternity in the crowd on the right-hand side; however, it emerges most strikingly in the print’s self-referentiality, where “making” Revolution is viewed through the lens of artisanal practice (the erasure and reinscription characteristic of printmaking), the commodity character of the image, and Debucourt’s attention to the boundaries and interactions between different media. In Almanach national, printed reproduction operates as an allegory of the reproduction of Revolution, and provisionality figures as a sign of things to come.

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CHAPTER SIX

PAPER TRACES PLAYING GAMES WITH THE REVOLUTIONARY PAST

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Stamps bristle with tiny numbers, minute letters, diminutive leaves and eyes. They are graphic cellular tissue. All this swarms about and, like lower animals, lives on even when mutilated. This is why such powerful pictures can be made of pieces of stamp stuck together. But in them life bears always a hint of corruption to signify that it is composed of dead matter. Their portraits and obscene groups are littered with bones and riddled with worms. WALTER BENJAMIN One-Way Street

Thinking about provisionality in revolutionary France eventually leads one to engage with moments, not only of hopeful beginnings—the coming into being of the journée des brouettes, the optimistic reimagining of future time in Debucourt’s Almanach national, or even the management of the Revolution in process evinced by identity documents and the like—but also episodes of destruction, death and disaster, breakdown and loss. These phases, and the images and objects that populate them, mark the failure of material instability as a document of conceptual openness and locate provisionality in terms of its endpoint, an afterlife conceived in terms of malfunction, blankness, stoppage, or collapse. Often provisional objects do not exist beyond this point and are eradicated, painted over, or thrown away. Sometimes, however, obsolescence marks the start of a continued, if altered, existence, in a collection, archive, or even another image. Indeed, it is at these moments of apparent revolutionary failure where the potential for images and objects to track and reflect upon the passage of time is perhaps most explicit and, sometimes, grimly playful. This chapter concentrates on a distinct genre of images that emerged on the Parisian print market in the protracted

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period of uneasy consensus that followed the end of the Jacobin Terror. These images, such as Benizy’s Valeur des assignats et autres papiers monnaies, depuis l’époque de leur emission en France, jusqu’à celle ou ils ont cessé d’avoir cours (fig. 74), represented the paper culture of the French Revolution, in particular its various attempts at a paper currency, as layered trompe l’oeils, and the prints were issued in a range of formats. Although some examples, such as Valeur des assignats, represent the paper notes in mint condition, others—for instance, François Bonneville’s Tableau d’assignats avec portraits de victimes et de profiteurs (fig. 75)—depict them as dog-eared debris. The assignat, the main subject of these prints (although laws, identity papers, and other documents also feature), had been withdrawn from circulation and destroyed in large quantities shortly before the images began to appear. At once successful commodities in a reemergent market for luxury products and striking stylistic anomalies within the wider field of print production, these trompe l’oeil images were also sites for the production of memory, materializing a traumatic engagement with the revolutionary past. Valeur des assignats, produced at least six years after Bonneville’s image, exposes the ways in which this engagement changed across time. Furthermore, as printed images that document the traces of other, recently defunct fragments of printed paper with a sometimes excessive clarity, a certain amount of temporal and conceptual slippage occurs between the trompe l’oeil images and their subject matter, forcing the viewer to engage with the representative function of both. In a 2005 article, Rebecca Spang has contested commonplace assumptions about the ways in which money is remembered, the presumed existence of an “economic unconscious,” and the effortlessness with which historians have thought the French people to have been “traumatized” by their economic past. “Of what,” Spang asks, “are economic memories made?”1 Spang’s approach to these questions covers

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Figure 74 J. Benizy dit. Jean Dubuisson [del. sculp.], Valeur des assignats et autres papiers monnaies, depuis l’époque de leur emission en France, jusqu’à celle ou ils ont cessé d’avoir cours, from Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. Colored etching and engraving, ca. 1800–1802. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, L 1984.253.2.56. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/Domaine de Vizille Figure 75 François Bonneville, Tableau d’assignats avec portraits de victimes et de profiteurs, 1796. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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different ground than my argument here, yet I suggest that these prints may be able to provide something else in the way of a response. The trompe l’oeil images, usually presented as little more than novelties or, confusing the works with their subject matter, as “ephemeral,” represent an attempt on behalf of revolutionary artists and audiences to make something substantive of the economic past, to hypostatize memory, and by doing so, to “think” the Revolution’s relationship to history—its successes, failures, and inheritances. It is, as we shall see, appropriate that this was achieved over a period of time in intaglio print, a medium that exists as an aftereffect of an effaced but enduring metal “original.” The trompe l’oeil prints appear, to borrow Freud’s formulation, to represent a kind of visual “acting out,” or repetition, in the place of coherent, unambiguous remembrance, a practice we might consider part of a process aimed toward accommodating revolutionary trauma.2 These contradictory and oblique images try and yet often fail to articulate clearly the relationship between economics, politics, visuality, and loss in the French Revolution. In so doing, they dramatize the extent to which reflection on the provisional could be, in the 1790s, a motor for recollection and reenactment of the recent past.

Last Rites On 19 February 1796, 30 pluviôse year IV by the Republican calendar, a huge pile of assignats was set alight in Paris on the Place des Piques, formerly (and subsequently) known as Place Vendôme (fig. 76). As a large crowd gathered, an official lit the furnace with funereal ceremony, while nearby the plates, casts, watermarks, and stamps with which the money had been made, thirty thousand pieces in total, were broken, melted, and ground down, to the sound of public rejoicing and cries of “Vive la liberté!”3 Given the sacrificial nature of this ritual, the processional devices that had preceded it, and the sense of

Figure 76 A. W. Huffner, Verbrennung der Assignaten in Paris am 19ten Febr. 1796, ca. 1796. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

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communality engendered by the potlatch destruction of wealth—not to mention an accidental temporal coincidence with the banned pre-Lenten carnival—the characterization of the ceremony by some commentators as the last great festival of the French Revolution appears justified.4 Although use of the assignat had signified personal patriotism, economic survival, and the Revolution’s successful transformation of signs, the financial strain engendered by counterfeiting, war, and speculation, and the assignat’s corresponding overissue, brought about a calamitous depreciation. Thousands were ruined by the assignat’s collapse, and on 10 pluviôse year IV (30 January 1796) the Council of the Five Hundred finally voted for the withdrawal of the assignat and the destruction of all remaining notes. At stake here were both economic and social values. The post-Thermidorean period in France was characterized by a crisis in authority. Following the stark clarity of moral choice under the Terror, it was unclear exactly what a Thermidorean political position should be, as the Directoire sought to generate a compromise between oppositional political ideologies inherited from previous regimes. As Georges Lefebvre observed, despite the ������ Directoire’s desire to distance itself from the excesses of 1793–94, the Terror was unable to end, because it was “too much in the interests” of those who followed to replay its crimes over and over again as a rite of self-definition.5 In print culture, the vilification of figures such as Robespierre, characterized as an effeminate, degenerate blood-drinker, suggested the lurking anxiety over the status of embodiment that typified the post-Terror climate of recriminations and revenge violence, and also pointed toward a deeply felt desire to promote shared practices and beliefs.6 Given the regenerative and communal aspirations underlying the issue of the assignat, it might have seemed to provide the ideal foundation for ideological consensus. But times had changed, and money was a major and predictably

divisive problem, exacerbated in the year from 1795 to 1796 by widespread and debilitating famine. This intensified after the delegitimization of the assignat, with a correspondingly negative psychological effect on the poverty-stricken.7 As Denis Woronoff relates, the number of suicides in Paris had risen to such a level that the minister of police was forced to prohibit the publication of weekly figures.8 Revolutionary violence and critical levels of dearth, neither of which disappeared under the ������������������������������������������� Directoire��������������������������������� , both contributed to the production of trauma long after the Terror had officially ended.9 Yet the Terror itself continued to be the main referent in most interpretations of these effects. Philippe Pinel’s early psychiatric experiments drew direct links between the trauma caused by the Terror period and postrevolutionary mental health in terms that, as Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has shown, predated Freud’s work on mourning, melancholia, and the inability of the mourning subject to renounce a lost object.10 Pinel described the case of a man who, during manic episodes, recounted at length the events of the Revolution with all the “force, dignity and purity of language” one might associate with a profoundly knowledgeable person of “the sanest judgment.”11 In all other circumstances, Pinel noted, this man was thoroughly “ordinary.”12 Such outbursts, enacting revolutionary events in a repetitious and comprehensive manner against a backdrop of habitual conformity, were also identifiable “symptoms” in revolutionary visual culture and might even be discerned in trompe l’oeil representations of assignats. Although Pinel did not explicitly mention the devaluation of the assignat as a cause of mental illness, of the cases analyzed at the Bicêtre hospital in the year III, aside from those he attributed directly to the events of the Revolution—among which the assignat must be included—there were a number brought about by vaguer causes such as the sudden thwarting of elevated ambition (a speculator’s malady if there ever were one) and domestic unhappiness. These etiologies would in

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many instances have been derived from the effects of the assignat’s devaluation.13 The trauma caused by the depreciation of the assignats was unevenly distributed and multiple, both a social and an emotional response to the deterioration of their economic worth and, collapsing past and present, an alienated reaction to the perceived failure of the Revolution itself. In linking the ruin of the assignat to the process of the Revolution, traumatic responses to the depreciation regularly conflated a delayed echo of the Terror’s debasement of revolutionary principles with a paradoxically nostalgic response to the disintegration of a regime that had at least, with the maximum and strict economic policing, attempted to stabilize rather than polarize wealth, something the bourgeois mandate of the Directoire had not been able to achieve. Patrice Higonnet has recently attempted to reexplain the Terror via a sophisticated reclamation of the “Young Marx” theory of revolutionary violence. For Karl Marx, the Terror was a consequence of the Jacobin inability to reconcile individual bourgeois rights with universalist values, a response predicated on fear. Engels, writing to Marx in 1870, reiterated this principle, stating that “we take it to mean the rule of the people who inspire Terror. On the contrary, it is the rule of people who are themselves terror-stricken. [. . .] I am convinced that we can attribute almost in its entirety the reign of Terror anno 1793 to petit-bourgeois philistines who have soiled their trousers from fear.”14 For Higonnet, this disjuncture was traumatic and a response to the violence that had pervaded French society since 1789, for “the realization that the entire reshaping of the Revolutionaries’ sense of self might have been useless or misguided was more than many Revolutionaries could bear.”15 The Terror was not only productive of trauma, it resulted from it too, and its aftermath could only be more intensely felt as a consequence. Accordingly, loss had an established language in 1796, informed inevitably by the

recurrent experience of terror. The process of allocating blame for the demise of the assignat indiscriminately recalled horrors that were in the process of being forgotten, officially at least. The fire ceremony of February 1796 signaled a rupture. It was intended to register a self-conscious break with the past, a sacrificial renewal that would allow the assignat’s successor as national currency, the largely identical mandats territoriaux, to prosper in its absence.16 Yet the legislative bodies responsible for the assignat’s destruction were mistaken if they thought a bonfire of notes could erase the memory of the recent past, neutralizing the association of the national currency with deprivation and political violence; the self-conscious forgetting of previous ways of doing things is, after all, the great revolutionary conceit. Firstly, forgetting was impossible in the first instance because the wholesale eradication of the assignat was in fact a fiction. The notes themselves were not demonetized straight away, continuing to circulate officially until at least July 1796—longer in practice—and at the point of their exchange for mandats in May there were still known to be twenty-three billion francs’ worth of assignats in circulation. Of course, the destruction of the assignats was but the latest in a line of terminal points, as successive issues of notes bearing the royal imprimatur had been withdrawn. As a 1793 drawing shows, not only did the disposal of the assignat have a prehistory, but the notes might, at any point, be used to identify and critique particular phases in the Revolution’s history (fig. 77). In an eloquent demonstration of how the assignat was tied to the life cycles of both individuals and political systems, the Girondin deputies, condemned to death, are shown here throwing assignats to the crowd, who tear them to pieces. Secondly, the assignat retained a residual visibility, lingering to trouble the consensus that was the desired outcome of its orchestrated symbolic “death” by way of its presence and, I argue, significant critical potential as a subject of contemporary print culture.

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Figure 77 Les députés de la Gironde condamnés à mort jetant des assignats au peuple qui les déchire, 1793. Musée du Louvre, Collection Rothschild. Photo: RMN/Thierry Le Mage

Time Is Money In the months following the ritual incineration of the assignats, a number of unusual images began to appear in the printshops of Directoire Paris, images that were only made possible by the assignat’s demise but whose motifs were to be recycled productively throughout the next decade. Derived from well-known and standardized practices of trompe l’oeil, these images depart nonetheless from the generic to engage directly with the specialized, emotive, and self-consciously historical field of revolutionary politics. Valeur des assignats (see fig. 74), number 123 of the famous sequential print series Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, is representative of this type of image, despite its decidedly uncanny presence in a publication that was otherwise devoted to narrative topography and portraiture.17 The basic format of this image is a high-end repetition of the numerous trompe l’oeil designs of varying size and quality that had been reproduced previously on fans, labels for tobacco or makeup boxes, and single-sheet prints. Sometimes these images featured a calendar or a detailed account of the assignat’s demise or were overlaid with an image of a ragged, peripatetic figure whose destitution bore witness to the financial wreckage brought about by the depreciation of the

assignat. Fusing high and low in a single image, this figure was regularly derived from a drawing of a beggar by Jacques Callot. With a similar theme in mind, one image dramatically polarizes the relative fortunes of a speculator, shown hoarding his cash, on the right-hand side with a well-dressed beggar, cap in hand, and a poverty-stricken citizen at a bare table on the left (see fig. 75). Yet in tableau 123, the assignats, mandats, and promissory notes of the Revolution are laid on top of one another on a black background, with no reference to objects or events outside the immediate frame of the image. As Norman Bryson has observed, trompe l’oeil asserts the autonomy of the deteriorating objects that constitute its subject matter, for in trompe l’oeil we are led to see objects as they “really are,” when our backs are turned.18 A haphazard impression is created by the overlapping of the notes, although a closer inspection reveals that the assignats (assuming we buy into the conceit that they ever existed as such) are clearly very carefully composed, their edges infringing upon one another but not to the extent that each note cannot be identified with ease. At the center of the image, the curled border of a 750 livres note articulates three-dimensionality and provides the only point of bodily intrusion on the scene, the rolling of the note accom-

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plished not mechanically but by anxious fingers. Filling a greater proportion of the paper surface than its neighbors and titled in a different typeface, this is the only image of the 145 narrative prints and 67 portraits published in the Tableaux between 1791 and 1817 that was consistently hand-colored, emphasizing further its awkward difference from the other prints in the series. The lack of recent and historical comment on Valeur des assignats is remarkable, and it is seldom reproduced alongside the better-known designs of artists such as Prieur, Berthault, Girardet, and Swebach-Desfontaines in the Tableaux, several of which have been discussed in previous chapters. As an anomaly whose diachronic title and subject matter contrast with the selection of synchronic pivotal events with accompanying explanatory texts in which the Tableaux traded, the image was not subject to direct piracy in the major derivative versions that circulated in Europe throughout the 1790s and early 1800s, the Tafereelen van de Staatsomwenteling in Frankrijk (1794–1807) and the Denkbuch der Franzoesischen Revolution (1817–19).19 The atypical irruption of this image into the series seems to correspond to the rupture it was hoped the assignat’s destruction would effect. Despite differences in subject matter, from battle scenes to executions, festivals to famous speeches, the plates in the series were produced according to a relatively uniform aesthetic, narrative action occurring within a perspectivally ordered scene, usually represented from a distance, and regulated by a panoramic background of identifiable architecture or landscape. Valeur des assignats also demonstrates a characteristic attention to the minutiae of daily life, albeit in far sharper focus, and, perhaps, in its massing of objects, a schematic reiteration of the crowd scenes so prevalent throughout the Tableaux. Yet the absolute removal of human context, explanatory narrative, or background in the image and the abrupt transition to a flattened, close-up, self-consciously illusionistic rather than ostensibly

“realistic” format suggest that this subject could not be accommodated seamlessly, and that the assignat required a distinct representational lexicon to that used for all the other prints in the series. Prints that depicted assignats were not, as we have seen, an unknown quantity prior to 1796. By virtue of legal proscription, assignats already operated apart from conventional image making, yet they were at the same time intimately connected to debates on the nature of representation, long before this self-awareness was reinforced by their reproduction in trompe l’oeil. However, the prior existence of images representing assignats—such as the counterrevolutionary caricatures of 1791—fails to account for the seemingly unmotivated appearance of Valeur des assignats in a publication sympathetic to the Revolution and otherwise devoted to documentary truth to form, landscape structure, and historical event. Tableau 68 (fig. 78), for example, Prieur and Berthault’s representation of the removal of the statue of Louis XIV on the Place des Victoires, is a typically perspectival and geographically specific work from the Tableaux that represents revolutionary violence against images in a far more orthodox way than tableau 123. Yet as it happens, both of these prints were in fact connected to the spatial politics of the life cycle of the assignat. From 1792, assignats had been made in reclaimed convents and monasteries on the Place des Victoires and on the former Place Vendôme. The transformation of church buildings into centers for assignat production replayed symbolically the appropriation of church property on which the original issue of assignats had been based. Consequently, a train of memories was established, each one inverting a previously dominant code. The political authority of the original assignat relied on the memory of the reclaimed land for which it stood. The Revolution of 1792 employed the memory of the assignat’s origins in its choice of site for manufacture, and four years later the revolutionary paper traces | 149

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legislature returned to one of these spaces, this time to destroy, not make, the once-precious currency. The events in the Place des Victoires are a story of revolutionary success; the effective conversion of royal into revolutionary signs. In contrast, the bonfire of assignats in the former Place Vendôme defies representation, its destruction of revolutionary symbolism an admission of defeat, and all we are left with in images such as Valeur des assignats is a fractured distillation of narrative, devoid of reference to a specific time and place. Significantly, the actual destruction of assignats was rarely represented, and when such images did appear, they were some time after the event or directed at an overseas print market (see fig. 76), a repression that resurfaced in the fetishistic representation of the defunct notes in the proliferat-

ing trompe l’oeil prints and their subsequent incursion into more formal historical accounts. Mysteriously, the 1798 prospectus for the Tableaux historiques had announced that tableau 123 would be a print representing the breaking of the assignat-printing plates on 30 pluviôse year IV, yet by the time of the print’s appearance, its subject had been changed, replacing the painful and specific with the general and abstract.20 It seems that despite the official joy occasioned by the ritual, it could not transcend the negative implications of the assignat’s failure. A trace of this amendment remains, as late as the 1817 edition of the Tableaux, in the text accompanying the image, whose concise explanation of the destruction of the assignat plates jars with the avoidance of the subject in the accompanying image.21

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Figure 78 Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculpt.], Statue de Louis XIV abatue, Place des Victoires, les 11, 12, 13 aoust 1792, plate 68 from Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, ca. 1794. Etching and engraving. Rare Books and Special Collections, Napoleon Collection, DC148 C65 1804 elf, McGill University Library, Montreal. Photo: Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University Library, Montreal

The incongruous publication of Valeur des assignats as number 123 of the Tableaux historiques speaks to the complicated ways in which the shifting signifiers of revolutionary representations could be mobilized to articulate both the continuities and radical disjunctures of the revolutionary period. This is an image whose subject and site of publication address at every level the passage of time and whose interpretation was inevitably dependent on the timing of the print’s appearance. Although the publication of a print about assignats had been announced in 1798, the print was eventually issued in the 1802 edition of the Tableaux historiques. As a result, this is a print that is at once both a representative example of and an image about the trompe l’oeil images (such as fig. 75) produced in the immediate aftermath of the assignat’s destruction. Viewed in 1802 and again in the edition of 1804, the year of Napoleon’s proclamation of himself as emperor, this image would have referenced not only a revolutionary past figured through its paper fragments—the subject of the print—but would have also acted as a reminder of the similar prints, by this point outmoded, that had populated the market some years previously and their attempts to represent in analogous fashion the economic course of the Revolution. It is additionally unusual for this reason, for while a protracted gap between announcement and actual publication was customary for this series, imitation or replication of other prints was not. In

fact, originality of design was vital to the marketability of the series, and the cycle of appropriation of themes and images tended to spiral outward from the successful Tableaux to its European competitors. So, how to explain the reappearance of this image in the early nineteenth century, if it is to be anything other than pastiche or opportunism? In a recent book, Deborah Jenson isolates what she refers to as “traumatic mimesis,” a form of repetition (in this case literary) that results from trauma. The French Revolution’s status as “original” engenders anxiety among those who follow. As she explains, “Traumatic mimesis is partly, for the inheritors of Revolutionary history, simply the trauma of experiencing one’s own era as a secondary text.”22 Furthermore, Jenson argues that “postrevolutionary traumatic mimesis in turn engenders what I call mimetic trauma. This is a form of repetitive play with the conditions and signs of traumatic mimesis. Mimetic trauma, ‘borrowed’ social suffering, performs the seductions of empathy with the trauma experienced by the social ‘other’.”23 While Jenson’s narrative, which seeks to explain the engagement of Romantic writers with the trauma of the revolutionary past, is defined by a significant temporal break between the primordial event or trauma and its mimetic representation, the trompe l’oeil assignats produced after 1796 are firmly entrenched within a more compacted history, but one that is mimetic across time nonetheless. The assignat, which encapsulates to a certain extent the originary myths and fantasies of the French Revolution, also operates as a space for imagining and empathizing with the “social other.” In other words, the ways in which the assignat mediated trauma and alienation for, say, revolutionaries and royalists informed one another. However, the reappearance of this print-form in 1802 suggests that the utility of the assignat and, more particularly, the image of the assignat was not exhausted, and that we might think of it usefully as materializing “mimetic trauma,” paper traces | 151

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re-rehearsing the traumatic repetitions of 1796 from a position of relative stability under the Consulate. This repetitious mimicry is one of the ways in which this image operates mnemonically, but it also suggests an entry point into a discussion of the suitability of trompe l’oeil for this task.

False Impressions That this composite representation of the paper money of the Revolution is executed in trompe l’oeil suggests that it is, at one level, a self-aware demonstration of artistic skill, an advertisement of technical proficiency in a recently resuscitated market, by Benizy, known as Dubuisson, its little-known designer and engraver. The subject matter of Valeur des assignats appears to allude to such self-referential commoditization, and certainly the Tableaux were marketed to a relatively well-off bourgeois clientele who would have been particularly aware of the opportunities afforded by a more open economic climate and alert to the extent to which the assignat had created as well as decimated fortunes. The image is in fact structurally similar to eighteenth-century English “medley” prints, which likewise used the illusionistic representation of print to advertise artists and print retailers.24 Benizy, by whom few works are known (a portrait of Immanuel Kant and a bureaucratic vignette for the Dépots Nationaux Littéraires), produced no other prints for the Tableaux, unusual in a publication that encouraged artist loyalty. While a “Dubuisson” was in fact among the many signatories of assignats, this connection was no more than a coincidence. Until August 1792, these signatories were commonly lowly civil servants selected on account of their especially beautiful handwriting, rather than according to seniority or appropriateness to the task.25 Subsequently, signatures on assignats were printed, which increasingly devolved human intervention on the assignat to a mechanically rendered sign.

The quotidian subject matter of the image conforms to standard conventions for trompe l’oeil representation, popularized in France before the Revolution in small-scale paintings by artists such as Gresly and Doncre, and well known at the turn of the century through the work of Boilly in particular.26 Identified with luxury trades, trompe l’oeil was used to decorate a range of objects, and in keeping with its classical and Renaissance associations, it remained a popular form of architectural embellishment, particularly as part of the mise-en-scène of revolutionary festivals, for instance, on Moitte’s trompe l’oeil marble frieze at the Festival of the Federation. However, as we have seen, the use of trompe l’oeil in such contexts was criticized, as it corresponded to a deceitful and impermanent form of simulation with potentially antirevolutionary associations. Susan Siegfried has recounted the criticism leveled at Boilly for his trompe l’oeil designs, which, in the postrevolutionary art world, were attacked as representative of “philistine” taste, appealing to a bourgeois market whose values were far removed from the high moral tone required by the Salon.27 To contemporary critics, trompe l’oeil appeared remote in intention from the grand aims of history painting. Its small scale, humble subject matter, and apparent lack of artistic imagination or design suggested an art form that could not aspire to the instruction of heroic citizens, while its association by default with a frivolous royal clientele rendered it politically suspect. Of course, neoclassicism was not immune from illusionism, its historicist verisimilitude peaking in David’s 1799 private exhibition of his Intervention of the Sabine Women in front of a large mirror, placed, according to the critic Chaussard, so that viewers could imagine themselves part of the work. Male viewers of this painting are reported to have examined its unnaturally smooth surface through lorgnettes, while female viewers observed it closely through magnifiers hidden in fans, as if seeking to uncover the brushwork that

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would destroy the illusion.28 Nevertheless, the Sabines was conceived within very different traditions of artistic education and production from small-scale trompe l’oeil designs, while their relative ownership and audience polarized the public and the private. Consequently, trompe l’oeil, despite its survival during and after the Revolution, was not a genre considered suitable to the task of revolutionary representation. As a debased form of representation in 1796—at least according to the criteria that determined ambitious, classically informed, and politically minded Salon painting—trompe l’oeil would have nevertheless appeared eminently suitable to the representation of decrepit, two-dimensional objects. Trompe l’oeil is an internalized representational strategy that conforms to a limited set of rules. Indeed, its formal conventions are so adamantly imposed that its practitioners have been accused of prioritizing a hermetic form of regulated intellectual exercise over any notion of artistic independence or creativity, posing a further challenge to representational conventions by way of its disposable subject matter and simulative challenges to an external standard of the “real.”29 Simultaneously drawing attention to the commodity status of both the image and its subject matter while referencing a certain draining of exchange value in its defunct knickknacks, trompe l’oeil also tends to resist narrative, focusing on an obsessive, fetishized object or set of objects that is not figured as elements of a story that continues beyond the boundaries of the frame. Where a narrative is discernible, for instance, via the representation of letters and other clearly “possessed” objects, it usually takes the form of a highly conventionalized memento mori that conceals any deeper narratives beneath a formulaic one. Sometimes conceived as a “portrait” of an individual via their possessions, the only temporally determined aspect of the trompe l’oeil appears in the suspicion that the objects (and perhaps, then, the individuals) represented are somehow transient, either already lost and forgotten or not long for this world.

In these terms, assignats would seem to provide suitable subject matter, having so recently passed into nonuse. These images speak of passing, of death, although they do so, I argue, via the mobilization of a rigid and seemingly repetitive style in the name of an unstable and topical social context. Jean Baudrillard has suggested that the generic structure of trompe l’oeil functions as a means by which we are to “hallucinate” our own deaths, its formal simulation prompting a meta-narrative that can only be morbid and self-reflective, a materialization of unconscious drives. Following the destruction of the assignat on the pyres of the Place des Piques, the trompe l’oeil reproduction of the fragile objects Baudrillard terms “ghosts that haunt the emptiness of the stage” could operate at a metaphysical level as a figuration of the transience of existence or perhaps of the instability of existence as a concept.30 This is enhanced by the ironic representation of a former sign of exchange value in a format traditionally reserved for objects whose very lack of value is a mainstay of their visual rhetoric. But why assignats? Were they simply offered up as a conventionalized reflection on the futility of wealth in the face of death, their brief topicality providing a nice opportunity for printmakers to make some profit with a pretty straightforward image, the kind with which they were already familiar from migrations of the “medley” format, or was something more at stake? Was it really possible for such overt visual meditations on mortality, money, obsolescence, and personal history to remain distinct from their post-Thermidorean context, as the unifying analyses of trompe l’oeil put forward by Baudrillard and others would imply? I would say no. In 1796, assignats were not any old litter, and the poignancy of their disappearance was not limited to the narrow frame of reference within which trompe l’oeil traditionally constitutes its subjects. Assignats were unavoidably political and inseparable from both the hopes and failures of the Revolution. Consequently, paper traces | 153

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this immediate and continuing political relevance actually makes them a strange subject for trompe l’oeil, whose formal consistency betokens a nostalgia born of conservatism and an easy reckoning with the fragments of the past. I am not suggesting an iconographical reading of these trompe l’oeils to counter the argument in favor of trompe l’oeil’s inherent adherence to principles of simulation and psychic economy put forward by Baudrillard, although I do believe it is important to contest the extent to which trompe l’oeil does effectively simulate its subject, the extent to which it really fools the spectator. Trompe l’oeil of this kind rarely transcends the limits of pictorial convention, the placing of an image in a frame, and fails when confronted by a mobile gaze. Meanwhile, the spectatorial pleasure it imparts, like a game in which players play not to win but for love of the game itself, is based more upon an acknowledgment that a deceit has been attempted rather than the success of that deception.31 More important for my purposes here, I want to emphasize how, by virtue of their printed reproduction of print, with assignats often reproduced “life-size,” these images subvert, in any case, the illusionistic transcendence of trompe l’oeil “proper,” whose effect is based upon the reproduction of an everyday scene or object in a different medium, most commonly paint on canvas. Inadequate trompe l’oeils (though for convenience I will continue to describe them as such), these images are invested with and unimaginable without reference to the histories of the assignat, particularly the anxieties and conflicts provoked by the illicit reproduction of the notes. Indeed, death is inscribed in these prints in ways more concrete than stylistic or generic affiliation— only a few weeks before the production of these images, their depiction of paper money would have been construed as counterfeiting and would have cleared a swift path to the guillotine for the artists and publishers involved. I suggest that the signs of trompe l’oeil were used in a strategic sense by artists precisely because they were aware of

the power of its conventional associations, which served to mask the real and present anxiety its subject had in this case provoked and to perform its existence in the past. These are repetitions, not memories, which, by showing the assignat to be obsolete and the Revolution it represented complete, aim to distance whatever traumas it might represent. This form of repetitive play with the image of the assignat is, however, active rather than discretely commemorative, resulting from a proximity to the traumatic experience. As Dominick LaCapra writes, “In acting-out, the past is performatively regenerated or relived as if it were fully present rather than represented in memory and inscription, and it hauntingly returns as the repressed.”32 Interestingly, in Valeur des assignats, the notes are pristine, “fully present,” returned to a mint condition that is only partially negated by the use of trompe l’oeil and its associations of obsolescence. This form of representation ultimately only served to enhance the contemporaneity of the assignat by bringing the past into the present and accentuating an association with revolutionary politics, the Terror and its recriminations in particular. The “accounting of loss” after the Terror is, I suggest, fundamental to the meaning of the assignats’ synthetic reproduction—not without cause did de Sade remind his reader that one of the many nicknames given to the guillotine blade was the “planche aux assignats.”33 The cut-up surfaces of the trompe l’oeil prints speak to this violent fragmentation and dismemberment. The connection between the assignat and the Terror operates nonetheless at a remove, at the level of association and inference rather than direct correlation. The assignat functions as the repressed object of the Terror, configured here as an ambiguous and far from conclusive memorial that mediates between subjective experience and historical event. While themes of temporality and remembrance are inscribed at a stylistic level in an image such as Valeur des assignats, the mystery of the image’s presence in the Tableaux is

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enhanced by its lack of an overt political message, perhaps unsurprising given the time lapse between the different stages of the print’s replication. This apparent intractability and lack of engagement with external issues—thought to be one of the defining features of trompe l’oeil—contributes to a specious but, as I have suggested, artistically strategic impression that, despite its weirdly disjunctive effect, the commemoration of the assignat in illusionistic space is a logical and intrinsic conclusion to an apolitical material existence. Rather, the “blankness” of this image expresses an inability or an unwillingness to remember, to narrate, and exposes a traumatic encounter, not only with the failed assignat but through it with the continuity of revolutionary history. The trompe l’oeil designs, especially those, such as tableau 123, which were part of marketable visual “histories,” demonstrate a desire on the part of artists and consumers to “deal with” the assignat, to incorporate it fully into a history of the Revolution and by doing so to neutralize it, although the enigmatic nature of the images themselves acts as an effective stumbling block to their desired visual and narrative literalism. Removed from circulation as a functioning commodity, in these images the assignat is reified as “art,” a subject rather than a means of representation, with significance for an art-buying audience far narrower than the millions who had circulated the assignat itself. Despite the impression of capitalist accumulation given by the “hoarding” of currency in trompe l’oeil representation, in this context the layering of the assignat signifies its removal from circulation, historicizes it, and conflates its many meanings, transposing the communal memory that the assignat represented to a private sphere of individual contemplation. Such a transition marks a difference from the self-conscious publicness of Jacobin culture to one characterized by individuation and personal response, a tension dramatized half a century later in the introduction to Jules Michelet’s Le peuple, a plea for universal fraternity that

includes, early on, a personalized recollection of the author’s father’s work in assignat production during the Revolution.34 However, the impenetrable literalness of Valeur des assignats is set into sharp relief by some of the images produced directly after the burning of the assignats, which betray an attempt to make meaning against the specific cultural and political backdrop of the French Revolution. Despite the assignat’s introduction well before the Jacobin seizure of power, many images, such as a small circular print (fig. 79) featuring a Death or Chronos figure hovering above a sea of overlaid assignats and tattered portraits blown into disarray by diminutive putti, appear to explicitly associate the obsolescence of the currency with the destruction brought about by the Robespierrist regime, sharing the gothic vitriol of much post-Thermidor print culture. In images such as this we see a negotiation of the symbolic economy of the assignat in which death, mourning, and loss are not referred to in an apolitical, nonreferential vacuum. The figures of (mostly) dead revolutionaries whose portraits, reminiscent of those published in the Tableaux historiques, float above the assignats are drawn from across the whole range of the political spectrum, from Maury to Lafayette to Robespierre, while the constitutions of 1791 and 1793 join the defunct notes as part of the flotsam of Revolution. Yet it is surely not without significance, in the Thermidorean context of the image’s production, that only the portraits of Marat and Robespierre, those “exterminating proconsuls who spread death, mourning and devastation,”35 as a contemporary play called them, are cut with the grim reaper’s scythe?36 In this vein, the spatial orientations of the portraits appear to mirror the political reputations of their subjects: Marat and Robespierre are upside-down because they index a Revolution that has been similarly distorted. The other figures are more or less upright, although the portrait of Bailly, a somewhat ambiguous figure, is slanted noticeably to one side.37 paper traces | 155

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Figure 79 Design for a Circular Tabatière Lid, with Trompe-l’Oeil Assignats and Portraits, ca. 1796. Etching. Private collection, on loan to the UCL Art Museum. Photo: author

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Just as the portraits here map a political history, so the assignats, shown together like this, track the progression from Constitutional Monarchy to Convention, via the progression from king’s head and fleurs-de-lys to revolutionary language and symbolism—eyes of surveillance, triangles, allegories of justice— printed on the notes. The trauma with which these images engage is polysemic and ambiguous, for the mutability of the assignats as signifiers of loss is such that they function variably as platforms for a range of political positions. The assignat in these images represents the passage of revolution in all its contradictory aspects, depending on the context of its display and juxtaposition, and it encouraged varied responses. For instance, the assignat could serve on one level as a symbol of revolutionary virtue (albeit a devalued one), signifying the collapse of a utopian system that in many accounts quite literally was the Revolution in ideal form. It could also, however, focus the imagination of those bereft at the post-1793 progress of a revolution they had supported, as well as those for whom the Revolution was always an aberration. This is a tiny image, measuring no more than three inches in diameter, into which a mass of detail has been condensed. Made to adorn the lid of a tobacco box, the image is round, a shape that forces an ocular association exacerbated by the need for “hard” looking. Only under the most intense individual scrutiny does the image reveal itself fully. At the top left-hand corner of the portrait of Mirabeau, the top left-hand corner of that of Lafayette, the bottom left-hand side of Necker’s portrait, and on an assignat between the portraits of Marat and Robespierre, at the torn edges of the frayed paper whose outline is further blurred by the shadow cast by the other fragments, are four silhouette profile portraits: Louis XVI unmistakably, with the others presumably Marie-­ Antoinette, Mme Élisabeth, and the dauphin. Once discovered, suddenly every shadow, every rip and fissure, becomes a potential ghostly face, the royal profile emerging, watermarklike, to structure the meaning of the assignat.

Royalist memorial imagery, such as a German print in which the silhouette profiles of the royal family appear alongside those of revolutionaries in the spaces outlined by the edges of a shattered Federative altar, complete with splintered fasces and toppled bonnet rouge-cum-jester’s cap (fig. 80), repeats this trick. Approximately banknote-size, this somber print bears a striking formal resemblance to pre-Republican assignats and their imprint of the sovereign’s physiognomy in negative space, a reading enhanced by the heavy black decorative border, a signal feature of eighteenth-century mourning cards but also a defining characteristic of the assignat and, of course, trompe l’oeil prints.38 Some years earlier, laws of 1792 and 1793 ordering the suppression of all signs of royalty or feudalism had led to arrests such as that of Mercier, a former fermier général, in nivôse year II (December 1793), at whose home the comité de surveillance of the Faubourg-Montmartre found the following: “80 prints representing, on one, a vase with a coat of arms of three fleurs de lys, and on another, a vase on a pedestal, with a twisted column; a complete game of cavagnolle, with cards bearing emblematic figures of royalty and feudalism, surrounded by vignettes decorated with fleurs-de-lys.”39 Investigating officers Courtois and Guibert were eager to point out that all these objects, as well as a portrait of Marie-Antoinette found on the premises, would be incinerated, although, as one report from March of that year maintained, they were fighting a losing battle, with the printed last testament of Louis and covert portraits of the royal family still publicly on sale among “the majority of print merchants.”40 Silhouettes (named, appropriately, after Étienne de Silhouette, minister of finances under Louis XV) had been fashionable for some time via the technology of the physiognotrace, a popular means of producing silhouette likenesses invented in 1788 and first demonstrated on the dauphin. As early as 17 thermidor (4 August 1794), the Gazette française announced publicly the paper traces | 157

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Figure 80 Villeicht enthüllen sich der Weissen vorsicht woege; auch selbst durch Robespierre, ca. 1794–1796. Etching. Private collection, on loan to the UCL Art Museum. Photo: author Figure 81 Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Trompe-l’Oeil Table with Playing Cards, n.d. Bastille stone, polychrome scagliola, and wood. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo © Musée Carnavalet/ Roger-Viollet/Philippe Ladet

distribution of a similarly secretive engraving, initially confusing but revealing the “perfect likenesses” of the royal family “when you have been initiated into the mystery.”41 The large print run of this image—the paper claimed that more than fifty thousand copies would be distributed—and the open announcement of its publication certainly suggest a degree of familiarity and ease with the form. Conventionally thought to be a way for royalists to demonstrate their allegiance in secret, thus avoiding persecution, it seems more likely that such images were concerned with a relatively public remembrance (a tobacco box, for instance, is hardly secret and would have invited examination), especially in the less proscriptive political atmosphere of Thermidor, when many exiled royalists returned to France. Furthermore, it is likely that viewers would have known where and how to look at such images, as aside from the physiognotrace, silhouette profiles were also a feature of illusionistic coptographs, or cut-out shapes, used in magic lantern shows and phantasmagoria, which shared a similarly gothic preoccupation with the dead. Between the trompe l’oeil of 1796 and the trompe l’oeil of the Consulate and Empire, then, we can see a lessening of direct political reference, or perhaps a focusing of meaning to

the point where a schematic trompe l’oeil representation of assignats such as that in Benizy’s print was all that was needed, its basic form recalling the fraught significations of its predecessors. Certainly the inclusion of hidden portraits of royal and revolutionary figures waned, although the technique remained fashionable well into the Napoleonic period. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, in Le nouveau Paris, remarked on this decline in obscured political emblems, suggesting it was a symptom of fatigue with the Revolution itself: “So many thousands of men have been devoured by it [the Terror], leaving no traces; and regrets for the old regime, if they are ever heard, have become so hackneyed, and the aristocracy have descended so low, that no one carries any longer these fans dexterously strewed with fleurs-de-lys, nor those mysterious sweet boxes, where the proscribed insignia of royalty can be expertly discovered.”42 However, the assignat itself, despite having “fallen with the villainy of a punctured balloon,” nonetheless “preserved its vital, vivacious character, even in the agony of death.”43 Later in his book, Mercier describes “an engraving that represented all the paper signs we have used during the Revolution,” an “allegory on paper money” that sounds remarkably similar to a print such as tableau 123.44

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Tricks of the Eye To fully understand the meaning of the assignat’s return as trompe l’oeil, we should look elsewhere too, to other areas of visual culture similarly invested in a politics of deterioration and mourning in the period between the end of the Terror and Napoleon’s coup d’état. For the mnemonic potential of extreme illusionism and a concern with the reuse or rephrasing of medium and materials were not the sole preserves of print culture. A table now in the Musée Carnavalet (fig. 81) appears as if abandoned midway through a game of cards, which scatter its plain surface.45 Some are laid out in organized hands while others are placed alone or in small clusters. One card has been torn in two and returned to the suite— perhaps thrown down by an angry loser? Maybe this is a clue explaining the arrested progress of the game and the desertion of the table? The use of trompe l’oeil encourages us to supply narrative where it is absent, to fill in the blanks. The weight of symbolism finally destroys the illusion, as the severed card, in the center of the “image” is, of course, a king. Read in the context of playing cards, Louis’s flight to Varennes disguised as a valet, the French word for a jack, was even more underhanded and dissimulative.

After this discovery, the table begins to reveal itself, first in terms of what is visible, then in terms of incongruities. The uppermost card of a pile to the top left-hand side carries a naïvely painted Republican symbol of the militaristic type, featuring a cannon, arms, and cockerel. This conceals a card whose legend is only partly visible, and we have to reconstitute the rest from memory or experience. “Par Palloy,” we read, followed by what may be “démolisseur de la Bastille,” although only “de” and the last four letters of “Bastille” are discernible. This small part of the table surface is layered with meaning, the invocation of Palloy’s name suggesting a deeper context confirmed by closer examination. The surface of the table is made from a polished slab of Bastille stone, upon which the cards have been painstakingly painted to create a random effect, fooling the viewer into believing that they are real. This table, made explicitly for the playing of games, is a game in itself. The layering of meaning that this object performs establishes it as a site of spectatorial gratification. The significance of the table’s construction, combined with deliberate attempts to complicate, obscure, or obstruct access to the meaning of the cards by partially covering text and images, indicate that the table is intentionally “hard to get,” instituting

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a mode of looking that forces the discovery of Republican symbolism. Perhaps it is time to reconsider Edmund Burke’s claim that revolutionary politics were transforming France into “one great play table” and to recall that the backs of playing cards formed the material base for billets de confiance in advance of the initial issue of assignats.46 As the Revolution progressed, playing cards themselves became subject to a visual “regeneration” analogous to that carried out elsewhere under the cultural program of the year II. Few iconographical changes had been made to playing cards immediately after 1789, for although they had a history of political use throughout Europe, the establishment of a constitutional monarchy meant that the position of kings and queens on cards was, for some time, tenable.47 Laws of 1701 had enforced the mandatory standardization of card design according to region, in order to simplify the collection of taxes levied on cards, while blocks used for printing had to be lodged with the authorities. Although card-makers had circumvented this proscription by publishing their designs as jeux de l’oie—dice-based spiral games often with explicitly historicizing or moral themes—that could subsequently be cut up by the purchaser for use as cards, the Revolution liberated card-makers from the obligation to standard practice, encouraging a diversity of production.48 Manufacturers from the famous card-making centers of Lille and Lyon were quickest to adapt to these new commercial opportunities, although Parisian card-makers soon emulated their efforts, and counterrevolutionary printmakers also used the card form to express political opposition. Jean-Démosthène Dugourc and Urbain Jaume, responsible for a set of cards sometimes attributed to the Comte de Saint-Simon, conflated a number of contemporary political references on the same set of cards.49 Unique in their egalitarian nature, these cards substituted equal “laws” for hierarchically organized kings, queens, and jacks, a reform that few other packs managed to emulate.50

These allegorical interpretations were, however, joined by packs that dealt in other revolutionary themes, such as Gayant’s Jeu des philosophes, or packs representing classical archetypes. As late as 1808, David was commissioned to produce a playing card design that would “substitute for the bizarre figures of kings, queens, and jacks a drawing whose extreme elegance and purity make counterfeiting difficult.”51 David’s drawings, engraved by Andrieu, an artist well known for his contribution to assignat design, were neoclassical allegories that provided the model for a similar series by Gatteaux in 1813.52 David’s cards were reprinted in several editions, the last in 1853. Alongside these technically superior and expensive cards were many popular versions, often featuring more demotic revolutionary symbolism: busts of Marat, liberty trees, and bonnets rouges. In a similar vein, the Strasbourg-based card-maker Louis Carey produced between 1793 and 1800 a revolutionary tarot, replacing the “Emperor” and “Empress” with “le Grand-père” and “la Grand-mère.” Carey reworked existing plates, so that kings became “génies,” queens “libertés,” and valets “égalités.” Similarly, crowns, globes, scepters, fleurs-de-lys, and imperial eagles were all removed.53 In the bottom left-hand corner of tableau 123, a playing card, augmented with manuscript additions, can be clearly seen peeking out from beneath the assignats. For playing cards read money, and vice versa. Palloy himself had used playing cards as commoditized and transferable identity cards for his workers demolishing the Bastille. These cards were often counterfeited or sold, not least by Palloy himself, to tourists eager to view the cells of the Bastille.54 In an environment characterized by speculation, corruption, and depreciation, widespread gambling, profiteering, and sharp practice of this kind found a ready market. Moral arbiters and victims of rigged games alike had welcomed the Revolution as a chance to purge the deviance that gambling and profiteering represented.55 As one anonymous

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author explained, “for a long time my soul and my pen have burned with the desire to make known to the public the danger of games, and the crimes of their most vile fiends.”56 For the Parisian deputy Jean Dusaulx, a member of the committee to certify vainqueurs of the Bastille, the regeneration of revolutionary festivals provided the most obvious counterpart to gambling. He remembered how prerevolutionary festivals “often caused more harm, in a single day, than half a century could bring about.”57 However, this situation was happily now no longer. “Festivals!” he remarked with satisfaction, “of course we will still have them, but quite different ones: we will have those of liberty, of equality; we will blush at the others.”58 The salvation of the festival was its distancing from the negative model of the game. Dusaulx concluded by stressing to the reader that “the passion for gambling instigated in the courts [. . .] is incompatible above all with the republican spirit.”59 Conversely, the Revolution also created opportunities for those eager to make fast money by organizing, bankrolling, or playing games of risk. New “professional” categories emerged, parodic inversions of conventional occupations, whose close relationship to their licit namesakes was similar to that of the printer to the counterfeiter, with whom gamers were often associated.60 The habitual surveillance and frequent raids of maisons de jeu encouraged the organizers of games to plant lookouts and, as often as not, to prepare elaborate defenses in advance.61 For instance, one Léonard, a carpet merchant whose apartment in the Hôtel Radziwill was subject to a police raid, tried to diffuse accusations of gambling by claiming that his companions were present to buy a set of prints the tenant had put on sale.62 Elsewhere, gaming equipment was adapted to dissimulation, and gaming tables often had double functions to disguise their true purpose, the addition or removal of a green felt surface quickly transforming the tables’ meaning. Among the primary motivations behind the police confiscation of gaming technologies, beyond the obvious desire for evidence

and the prevention of future use, was the need to keep abreast of innovations in gaming camouflage.63 The pessimism of Darracq, a member of the Council of Five Hundred, indicates the affinities drawn between this sort of dissimulation and the criminal or morally degenerate character of the inhabitants and frequenters of the gaming houses, who were constantly occupied with tricking the eye of judicial surveillance: “The police force has eyes there unceasingly . . . ; and never seeing there either the man of genius, nor the hard-working artist, nor the loyal speculator [spéculateur], nor the patriot: but meeting always in these filthy sewers the idler, the inane one, the speculator [agioteur], the bankrupt, the swindler, the conspirator . . . it assesses them, it classifies them . . . it watches them. . . . In vain these poor wretches pile mask on mask, and try to disguise themselves.”64 The most infamous site for gambling was the area surrounding the Palais-Royal, a permeable zone that prioritized neither interior nor exterior. The open colonnade around the park accentuated a dubious “in-betweenness” that was mirrored in the sites chosen for game-playing: in private houses and businesses, and in the streets and passages themselves.65 In a subversion of the ideal of the eighteenth-century salon as a site of intellectual contest and gendered sociability, the hôtels particuliers of Paris often played host to gambling dens, which varied in exclusivity and stakes. The association of the Palais-Royal with the Duc d’Orléans further emphasized this blurring of boundaries, for the duke was neither public monarch nor private individual. Associated, perhaps most flamboyantly during the Directoire, with transgressions such as prostitution and speculation in currency, the Palais-Royal was a place where materials shifted shape and objects could easily deceive the eye. As the police spy Beraud reported in September 1793, “the jewelers at the Palais-Royal are proven cheats; they sell half-copper objects; many people complain; the people ask for inspectors.”66 paper traces | 161

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Croupiers invariably fixed games, and the resentment and desperation this caused is reflected in police records. However, the appeal of, for example, the builder Jacques Michel, requesting the return of a watch lodged with a banker of a game of biribi on the rue Traversière-Saint-Honoré, or the complaint of the merchant Ferdinand Milner, who lost his money at biribi and was forced to leave by armed heavies, almost certainly did not result in the return of their investments.67 Although maisons de jeu were carefully monitored by the police and their many spies, this surveillance network was largely overwhelmed by the quantity of illegal ludic activity taking place.68 The visible invisibility—the trompe l’oeil, even—of gambling was at the heart of attempts at its suppression, motivated by horror at the publicity that gambling maintained and the masking and subterfuge that allowed it to operate in close proximity to “conventional” society. As Boissy d’Anglas warned, these criminal acts “are carried out under your eyes; they are propagated all around you.”69 This spectatorial emphasis pervaded the gambling experience, from inside and out, its fugitive and semiobscured character paradoxically bringing about an intensified scrutiny. As I have suggested, the reception of the assignat was often framed in relation to these debates on gambling and speculation and their degenerative effects on the national body, a set of discourses that hinged on an unstable, playful relationship between the visible and the invisible. However, against this background of paranoia, dissimulation, and double-bluffing, I want to make the case that the trompe l’oeil images of paper money attempt a cross-media replication of a deceptive visual economy that had in fact been established by the assignats themselves, and that this was essential to their processing of the alienation to which both the destruction of the assignats and the experience of the Terror contributed. The significance of these prints was determined by politicized ways of looking initiated by the assignat itself. The formal, layered arrangement

of the notes in these prints arrests the gaze, “trapping” it in a net of fractured, compound objects—rather than fooling, defeating, or diverting it, as the generic categorization as trompe l’oeil might suggest. The viewer is encouraged to take a position, to identify with an assignat from a particular phase of the Revolution as a sign of personal allegiance. Such a formal “layering” as a means of situating subjectivity or political commitment had parallels in other areas of material culture around this time—for instance, the incorporation of the woven hair of dead revolutionaries and royalists alike into elaborate reliquaries or jewelry that in some cases echoed formally the methodically superimposed fragments of the trompe l’oeil images, the intertwined hair of the victim forming a lattice whose resistance to separation rendered ephemeral fragments solid.70 Similarly, Alexandre Lenoir’s subjective assemblage of sculptural and corporeal remnants (for many of the tombs contained bodies) at his Musée des Monuments Français�������������������������������������� in the monastery of the Petits-Augustins, approved in 1796, charged juxtaposed fragments with the task of representing collective memory.71 In this context we might also consider the disturbing composite imagery of drownings, burnings, and executions that illustrated the journalist Louis-Marie Prudhomme’s audit of Terrorist violence in his Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Révolution (fig. 82), an account of atrocity whose main task, like the trompe l’oeil prints, was a figuration of memory based on the model of a divided, politically partisan, revolutionary subjectivity.72 The numerical tables recording revolutionary deaths and disasters that accompanied this print in Prudhomme’s Histoire bear comparison with those documenting the depreciation of the assignat that were often published alongside trompe l’oeil assignats, and that appeared in some editions of the Tableaux historiques. Finally, these tables—and perhaps the recounting of recent history in the trompe l’oeil assignats too—resemble

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Figure 82 Tableau d’une partie des crimes commis pendant la Révolution et particulièrement sous le règne de la Convention Nationale, from Louis-Marie Prudhomme, Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et des crimes commis pendant la Révolution, vol. 1, plate 1, 1797. Etching. The British Library, London, 935.f.5-9. Photo © The British Library Board

nothing so closely as the almanacs that catalogued the cyclical events of previous years but that, with the Revolution, were faced with an unanticipated, irreversible caesura. The anthropologist Alfred Gell has observed how “not designed to communicate or function as a sign (in fact, designed to be hidden and escape notice), the trap nonetheless signifies far more intensely than most signs intended as such.”73 The tricks, ghosts, and absences of the trompe l’oeils, their hidden messages and lurking faces, are replete with meaning, not empty of it as their obsolescence might at first suggest, functioning as traps that detain the viewing subject, forcing a subjective, politically orientated identification with the recent past. Gell adds, “Moreover, we are able to see that each [trap] is not only a model of its creator, a subsidiary self in the form of an automaton, but each is also the model of its victim.”74 Echoing Walter Benjamin’s claim that “genuine memory must [. . .] yield an image of the person who remem-

bers,” both viewer and assignat are trapped in the trompe l’oeil, just as the notes themselves had ensnared their viewers.75 For entrapment was, of course, a characteristic of the assignat, in the “deliberate mistakes” that enticed counterfeiters to produce copies more accurate than the originals and in the complex hidden nets of the watermarks (fig. 83). In assignat production, paper was no longer to be reduced to “the function or topos of an inert surface laid under marks, a substratum designed to uphold them, to assure their survival or subsistence.”76 Inlaid watermarks bearing patriotic inscriptions functioned as “webs” to snare counterfeiters, although the intricate wire filigranes sometimes took years to complete, by which time economic value gave way to aesthetic value as the notes themselves became obsolete.77 In addition to the watermark, other technical features such as the timbre sec and timbre identique subverted or altered the physical integrity of the surface of the paper rather than leaving an inked mark on

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Figure 83 Assignat (illuminated from beneath to show watermark), five hundred livres, 1794. Etching, engraving, and typography on watermarked paper. Private collection. Photo: author Figure 84 François Bonneville, Tableau des assignats (avec cartes à jouer et lunettes), 1796. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

it. Eager to replicate the prestige of the coin, the timbre sec performed a play at three-dimensionality that is echoed in the illusionism of the trompe l’oeil. Assignats were designed for close examination, and it is unsurprising that the trompe l’oeil images, particularly those small tabatière prints that were undoubtedly intended to be viewed beneath some form of magnifier, make a clear association between this form of subject matter and a demanding

visuality. In one print (fig. 84) a pair of spectacles lie abandoned on an assignat and playing card trompe l’oeil, as if the owner has momentarily put them down after a period of concentrated examination, only for the glasses themselves to become incorporated into the illusion. As a physiognomically informed obituary of Robespierre, narrated by James H. Johnson, suggests, the wearing of spectacles could evoke a politicized scopophilic anxiety very much in tune with

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revolutionary unease about hidden or masked subjects and meanings: “He was crime incarnate. He covered his eyes with spectacles to keep people from looking into his soul.”78 The playing card on the right-hand side of this print, inscribed with a reference to the devaluation of public assets (“Fortune public ruiné”), is an example of a bon or promissory playing card, exchangeable, in this case, for food. “Bon pour un dejeuner sur le carreau,” it reads at the base. Carreau, which means a diamond card (and also evokes carreaux, vernacular for spectacles), directs attention to the illusory and ludic aspects of the assignat’s value. Furthermore, to be left “sur le carreau”—an expression derived from Ancien-Régime judicial procedure—signals that one has been put to one side, discarded, forgotten, or rendered unemployed. Served in the straitened climate of Thermidor, the meal that this playing card promises was not to be the most enticing, the devaluation of the notes ensuring a paltry return. In 1796, shortly after the performative staging of the assignat’s demise on the Place des Piques, the terse statement of abandonment on this trompe l’oeil playing card is an eloquent marker of the disenfranchisement and obsolescence that attended the assignat’s destruction. One of the cards painted on Palloy’s trompe l’oeil table

also employs this phrasing, although to more explicitly “patriotic” ends: “sur le  est l’aristocrate,” it reads. However, the arrest in June 1798 of one Bévalet, a porcelain merchant on the rue de la Lanterne, for displaying outside his shop a print (surely this print) “depreciating paper money” complete with “a ten of diamonds on which was written—public fortune, ruined etc,” demonstrates how the ambiguity of the trompe l’oeil format and its prioritization of interpretation encouraged responses that were inevitably subjective, political, and historically contingent.79 The playful polysemy of these images and the others like them belies the extent to which they helped navigate diverse political and historical positions and how, for a relatively brief but highly significant period after 1796, trompe l’oeil representations of paper money were prominent cultural mediators of revolutionary trauma. Reproduced in different forms into the early nineteenth century, they provided a visual language for revolutionaries and those who opposed the Revolution to articulate, if not resolve, alienation and grief (as well as reconciliation and profit) across a range of cultural products, offering in the process a privileged site to think through what it meant to be “postrevolutionary.”

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CONCLUSION

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An image from 1790 represents Jean-Sylvain Bailly, then mayor of Paris, leading Voltaire and other precursors of the Revolution to the city of the future (fig. 85). Emerging from a mantle of gloomy cloud, Bailly, clad in the black garb of a representative of the Third Estate, reaches out with one hand to the elderly philosopher, behind whom trail an orderly line of long-dead figures: Rousseau in his dressing gown, Henri IV in armor. With his other hand, Bailly points toward a strange Piranesian accumulation of structures and objects— part heavenly city, part necropolis—some of which are covered with pasted images and explanatory texts. As an allegory of fame trumpets the arrival of this curious procession, a disorderly muddle of figures representing the forces of feudalism and identified by their attributes (a lettre de cachet, the livre rouge, a crown, and a coat of arms) are thrown into disarray by a génie armed with a burning torch of Enlightenment, impressing on the viewer that the appearance of this hallucinatory cityscape has been made possible by more tangible changes in the political world of late eighteenthcentury France. Yet the image remains uncertain, for despite Bailly’s guidance from the present, no clear path exists through the amassed objects that confront the motley crowd of figures from the past, who hang back, seemingly unsure of how to proceed into the future. This, clearly, was not architecture made for habitation but was rather a space of both remembrance and projection, a prospect of a world to come in which futures yet to be enacted would be ceaselessly commemorated. The image might be considered an extreme representation of what Richard Etlin has defined as “numinous revolutionary space,” in which, as with the empty site of the destroyed Bastille, an unseen presence or spirit was evoked as central to its symbolic value.1 For this image of the future is populated largely by monuments yet to be built, interspersed with a few objects that derive from the Revolution’s brief history to date.

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Notable among these are one of Palloy’s Bastille simulacra, hovering above Bailly’s head, and on the left-hand side of the image, Cellerier’s Federative arch. Positioned at the boundary point between a murky past of dark clouds and a series of ever-grander monuments to come, climbing vertiginously into the distance, these works allegorize revolutionary visual production as a sign of the Revolution’s rupture with the past and employ made objects as markers of historical process. No physical artifacts produced prior to 1789 are present, while the Revolution’s heritage is represented solely by the nervous line of historical figures, tourists in a land that even they could not have anticipated. At the same time, the presence of Palloy’s “Bastille,” the Federative arch, and the various narrative images on the columns destabilizes the authority of this dream city, for the flimsy, appropriated, or speedily put together nature of their construction threatens to undermine the tangibility of the other structures, which are, in any case, imaginary. Like Benjamin’s angel of history in reverse, “wreckage upon wreckage”—the curious debris of the Revolution in progress—is piled up in the future and set in stark opposition to the empty space of the past.2 A work such as this one, which so self-consciously attempts to articulate the Revolution’s relationship to its own history, forces viewers of the image to think about questions that we are seemingly no closer to answering now than were the people of the 1790s, but with which this book has nevertheless attempted to engage, albeit obliquely: namely, where does the French Revolution fit into our narratives of modernity, and, in the contextual framework of this project, how does the visual culture of the period participate in such a teleology? The idea that an image of the past intersected with and haunted revolutionary conceptions of the future is not a new one, achieving its most explicit formulation in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon and in the work of generations of scholars influenced by Marx. The interplay of

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Figure 85 Bailly conduit Voltaire et autres précurseurs de la Révolution française vers la cité future, ca. 1790. Ink and gouache on paper. Musée National de la Coopération Franco-Américaine, Blérancourt. Photo: RMN/Gérard Blot

past and present as a condition of the revolutionary political imagination is therefore a given characteristic of a modernization thesis that accords the French Revolution a pivotal role as an unprecedented rupture. The past few decades of revisionist scholarship, rather than challenging this assumption, have actually reinforced it; by shifting the focus from Revolution to Enlightenment and challenging the Revolution’s transformative role, scholars have accentuated the interpenetration of different temporal modes rather than diminished it.3 This is a complex debate that exceeds the confines of this book, and I have no desire to restate an already somewhat overdetermined historiographical narrative. That the Revolution occupies a crucial role in the mythic structures (the pluralization is crucial) we understand as modernity is, it

seems to me, somewhat self-evident. Yet rather than seek the ghosts of the Roman Republic in the Revolution’s visual culture so as to repeat a story we already know, I have suggested that by examining a field of representation—the “ephemeral”—that was always already about time, we might come to a better understanding of the ways in which revolutionaries were able to think through their place in history. For the “ephemeral” names both that which is fleeting and that which remains, the object to be destroyed, but also the mass-reproduced, collected, and preserved. The narrative suggested by an examination of such material traces is not linear but fragmented, multilayered, and dialogic.4 Visual culture in revolutionary France provided a terrain where revolutionary subjects could make and remake

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themselves and others with remarkable freedom, but in ways that promised always to transcend their fragile material support and make a claim for permanence. This, then, is a story not just of production but of the many ways that people responded to and used images—the ways in which they burned, folded, discarded, pasted, posted, wrote, inscribed, sketched, catalogued, altered, touched, worshipped, copied, exchanged, and viewed them—and how, by doing so, they formed a better idea about where they stood in relation to the Revolution itself. The nostalgia that inevitably accompanied revolutionaries’ various and often contrary attempts to place

themselves in time was both facilitated and countered by a visual culture identified as provisional. For while making room for a melancholic reflection on the recent and archaic past, “ephemeral” images and objects (or works that spoke to the conditions of “ephemerality”) also opened onto a potentially limitless future in which the position of subjects in relation to the Revolution could be continually formed and reformed in conjunction with their visual analogues, remade not just in the image of the Revolution but in the image of revolutions yet to come—as Palloy (who always liked the last word) put it: “The Revolution pulls down, and reproduces!”5

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NOTES

introduction

1. AN AE/I/9/4. For the decree of the National Assembly of 16 June 1792 giving Palloy permission to begin work on a monument at the Bastille, see Loi relative à l’établissement d’un monument. 2. AN AE/I/9/1a and 1b. 3. This device (the “mouton national”) is described in the procès-­ verbal of this event, at AN AE/I/9/1. 4. For two recent analyses of the contrary significations of revolutionary iconoclasm, see Clay, Transformation of Signs; and Naginski, “Object of Contempt,” 32–53. 5. See AN AE/I/9/2 and 3. 6. On the various plans to erect a monument on the Bastille site between 1811 and 1830, see the documents in AN F13 1243. 7. See Wagner, “Outrages,” 294–318. 8. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary. 9. For an overview of the conditions for revolutionary art practice, see Philippe Bordes’s essay in Bordes, Michel et al., Aux armes et aux arts!, 103–36. 10. Quatremère de Quincy, Éloge historique, 8 (all translations are mine unless otherwise noted). 11. The reclamation in the 1970s of a “political” David marked the beginning of a renewed interest in the artist’s work, characterized by some sophisticated and groundbreaking scholarship. Rather than attempt an inventory of these works, I would refer the reader to two important collections of essays that brought together David scholarship at the point of the bicentennial and two decades later. These are Michel, David Contre David, and Ledbury, David After David. 12. Nochlin, “Fragments of a Revolution,” 157. 13. See the insightful readings of this work in Fend, Grenzen der Männlichkeit, 76–84; Foissy-Aufrère et al., La mort de Bara; Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 230–36; and Weston, “Jacques-Louis David’s La Mort de Joseph Bara,” 234–50. 14. For a sophisticated account of the ways in which nineteenthcentury collectors and historians responded to revolutionary material culture, see Stammers, “Bric-a-Brac,” 295–315. 15. Baudelaire, “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” 355. 16. Ibid., 344. 17. Wrigley, Politics of Appearances, 13. 18. Hunt, “Experience of Revolution,” 678. Of the seven articles in this forum and the many responses to them that appeared subsequently on the H-France listserv, Hunt’s was the only one to explicitly engage with the subject of imagery.

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19. See, for instance, Landes, Visualizing the Nation; and Reichardt and Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution.

chapter one

1. Griffiths, Prints for Books, 140. 2. On the historiography of the assignat, see Albertone, “Une histoire oubliée,” 87–104. 3. Until the introduction of the franc in 1795, there were twenty sous (or sols) in one livre and twelve deniers in one sou. 4. Dominique-Vincent Ramel-Nogaret, quoted in Lafaurie, Les assignats, 7. 5. Mercier, Reflexions d’un patriote, 4. 6. Muszynski, Les assignats, 11. 7. Notes of 200, 300, and 1,000 livres were issued, bearing 5 percent interest. Dupont de Nemours was one of many to attack the exclusivity of the large denomination notes as unpatriotic, arguing that even when issued in smaller denominations some years later, assignats were useful only to the rich, who used depreciating assignats to repay debts owed to the poor. Dupont de Nemours, Effet des assignats, 3. 8. For a critique of this “inheritance,” see Spang, “Ghost of Law,” 3–26. For eighteenth-century discourses on public credit, see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge. 9. Gignoux, La planche à assignats, 55. 10. See Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée Nationale, 1 June 1790, 10, for an account of this delay. 11. Muszynski, Les assignats, 13. 12. Ibid., 13. 13. See Pilet-Lemière and Jigan, Collections monétaires. 14. On 5 May 1791, Armand Gaston Camus proposed that two million livres should be set aside to reward informers. A law of 27 February 1792 ensured that anyone engaged in counterfeiting who denounced their accomplices would, on presentation of material proof, escape punishment. Loi relative aux fabricateurs et distributeurs de faux assignats, 5. Consequently, dénonciateurs often outnumbered their victims, as was the case in the famous trial of Lamievet and Dunan, condemned on the evidence of five former accomplices. Précis de l’affaire des faux assignats, 2. See also Cubitt, “Denouncing Conspiracy,” 143–58. 15. On the transformation of the revolutionary seal of state, see Hunt, Politics, 87–119. 16. Jugement du tribunal criminel établi à Anvers. 17. Burke, Reflections, 119. 18. L.-C. de L., Reflexions, unpaginated.

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19. Bruguière, “Assignats,” 59. 20. For accounts of the assignats’ manufacture, see Lafaurie, Les assignats; Mercier, L’argent des révolutionnaires; Muszynski, Les assignats; and Rizo, L’assignat et la Révolution. On the economic history of the assignat, see Harris, Assignats. 21. On the social role of money, see especially Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 283–347. 22. See de Baecque, La caricature révolutionnaire; and Melot, “Caricature and the Revolution,” 25–32. 23. Muszynski, Les assignats, 43. 24. Burke, Discours, 17. 25. These notes were printed at Châtillon-sur-Sèvre with a plate engraved in England. The plate was seized and destroyed after the royalist defeat at the Battle of Savenay in December 1793. Rouillé, Assignats et papiers-monnaie, 24. 26. On Wébert, see Duprat, “Le commerce de la librairie Wébert,” 357–66. Wébert was eventually arrested and sentenced to death, alongside Boyer-Brun, on 1 prairial year II (20 May 1794). 27. Langlois, Caricature contre-révolutionnaire, 52–53. 28. On the early history of the Archives Nationales, see Favier, La mémoire de l’état. 29. See, for instance, Lettre de Monsieur M*** a Monsieur J***. 30. A lawyer by profession, Camus (1740–1804), a member of the National Assembly from 1789 to 1791 and of the Convention in 1792, achieved notoriety for his responses to the papal bulls of 1791 condemning the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Camus was, alongside Bailly, the first to enter the tennis court at Versailles on 20 June 1789 and was the second signatory to the oath. He was later imprisoned in Maastricht as part of the group sent to recapture the traitorous general Dumouriez. See Camus, Mes pensées; and Préteux, Armand-Gaston Camus. 31. Boyer-Brun [Boyer de Nîmes], Histoire des caricatures, 369. Boyer-Brun’s description of Camus as “entirely” made of assignats is, of course, not quite correct. 32. Brissot steals a note bearing the legend “je brissote,” equating his name with the act of theft. On the evolution and popularity of the verb “brissoter,” see Ellery, Brissot de Warville, 218–19. 33. Marx, Capital, 208. 34. The image of Barnave is copied from his own self-portrait, as reproduced in Chevallier, Barnave, 45. 35. Langlois, “Counterrevolutionary Iconography,” 49–50. 36. This print is described in Mercier, Le nouveau Paris, vol. 4, 213. 37. See Vous n’avez pas de nez, Camus.

38. Boyer-Brun, immediately following his discussion of L’homme aux assignats, recounted the depreciation of his money at the hands of a caricatured Jewish speculator known as M. Rafle. Boyer-Brun, Histoire des caricatures, 374–75. Similarly, Hébert’s Père Duchesne criticized unpatriotic speculators, identified by their “long noses,” who sold petits assignats at the door of the Palais-Royal. Anti-Semitism also surfaces in many accusations of fraud or theft involving assignats. Herbert, Le Père Duchesne d’Hébert, vol. 1, 528–29. See also Plainte en escroquerie par Jacques Delalande, prêtre, député du baillage d’Evreux à l’Assemblée nationale, contre deux juifs qu’il avait fait venir pour négocier des assignats, APP AA, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de police, Section de Roule, 7 juillet 1791. 39. See de Baecque, Body Politic, 175. 40. This point is made in Langlois, Caricature contre-révolutionnaire, 52–53. For a more explicit use of the rebus, see the print portraying an assignat via two capital “A”s separated by an image of a swan (“A-cygneA”), hovering above the head of a priest, in BN Réserve QB-201(121)FOL. Hennin 10668. 41. This image was first published in Naples in 1797–98 on the order of Queen Marie-Caroline and appeared in France in 1799. Premières collections: Musée de la Révolution française, 85. 42. See Weston, “Corday-Marat Affair,” 134–35. 43. Clark, “Painting in the Year Two,” 53. 44. This predicament motivated the Buges paper factory’s defense of the dimensions and weight of their assignat paper. Responding to accusations of having produced defective assignats, the factory argued that engravers had diminished the quality of the paper by soaking it for impression. Mémoire pour la papeterie de Buges, 4–5. 45. Messieurs . . . le 15 février 1791. Similar circumstances stimulated proposals to make assignats from squares of embroidered silk. 46. In 1790, the Courtalin-based Réveillon was among those given the commission to make paper for assignats. See Anisson-Duperron, Lettre du directeur d’Imprimerie royale, à MM. du comité des finances, 1. 47. Messieurs . . . le 15 février 1791, 1. 48. Ibid., 2. 49. Alongside artists including Pajou, Moitte, and Gois, David was a member of the jury set up to select stamps for forthcoming assignats. See Benzaken, “David et la numismatique,” 972. The evidence for David’s contribution is supported by the existence of a drawing of the génie of the Constitution intended for the timbre sec of the assignat of five livres, 10 brumaire year II (31 October 1793), signed by David with the approving appellation “apart from a few minor corrections.” MNAM

172 | notes to pages 17–30

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Assignats/27. The competition encouraged bitter rivalry between artists Gatteaux and Droz. See Gatteaux, Aperçu sur la fabrication des assignats; Droz, Réponse du citoyen Droz; and Droz, Réplique de J.-P. Droz. Also, Poissault, Eveil aux artistes, which claimed that Poissault’s design had been copied by rival artist Dupeyrat. 50. Vivé, Cause célebre. 51. Over three hundred people were guillotined for counterfeiting assignats, more than half of them in Paris. Lafaurie, Les assignats, 57. The death sentence for counterfeiting was reduced in 1832 and eventually rescinded in 1960, to be replaced by hard labor for life. In 1992 this was changed to thirty years in prison and a three million franc fine. L’art du billet, 63–64. 52. See too the assignat in no. 52 of Révolutions de France et de Brabant (1790), discussed in Naginski, “Object of Contempt,” 42–43. 53. Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, 128–29. 54. See Faliu, “Le calculateur patriote,” 11–20. 55. Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant 82, 27 June 1791, 187. 56. Découverte pour transporter les assignats, 8. 57. See, for instance, Jugement rendu par le tribunal criminel du département de Paris. In this judgment Daniel Houzel and Jean Mury were sentenced to death for counterfeiting, the evidence corroborated by references to the “disguises” they had worn. 58. See Bouchary, Faux-monnayeurs, 29–42. 59. Chronique de Paris, 14 March 1792. See also Belléroche, Rapport et projet, 5. 60. Muszynski, Les assignats, 14. 61. Bower, “Economic Warfare,” 46–63. 62. Carpenter, Refugees, 11. 63. Burrows, French Exile Journalism, 149. 64. Lavigne, Rapport et projet, 3. 65. Ibid., 5. 66. Muszynski, Les assignats, 69–70. 67. Police records demonstrate that the municipal authorities were aware of the risk of counterfeiting in these prisons. See Procès-verbal de visite à la Conciergerie pour la recherche de planches servant à fabriquer les faux assignats, APP AA, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de police, Section de Pont-Neuf, 16–18 juin 1791; and Procès-verbal de perquisition à la Force, dans les chambres de deux détenus, soupçonnés de fabriquer des faux assignats, APP AA, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de police, Section Homme-Armé, 23 août 1791. 68. See the dispute over the commission for the manufacture of assignats in Anisson-Duperron, Lettre du directeur de l’Imprimerie royale,

à M. le président de l’Assemblée Nationale; and Anisson-Duperron, Observations du directeur. 69. AN F4 1013. 70. Mercier, L’argent des révolutionnaires, 11. 71. Jammes, Les Didot, 17; Bouchary, Faux-monnayeurs, 107. For De la Marche’s response to his denunciation by a former employee, Larcher, who opposed the move to mechanical numbering of assignats, see De la Marche, Directeur-général de la fabrication des assignats, 1–16. 72. Bouchary, Faux-monnayeurs, 109. 73. Deperey, Le vérificateur en chef des assignats, 1–2. 74. Deperey, Tableau des différentes espèces d’assignats faux. 75. Deperey, Le vérificateur en chef des assignats, 3–4. 76. Ibid., 3–5. 77. Ibid., 5. See also Grignon and Maxim, “Convenance, Caractère, and the Public Sphere,” 29–37. 78. Deperey, Le vérificateur en chef des assignats, 8. 79. See Mercklein, Pétition, 1. 80. Lavoisier, Réflexions générales, 1. 81. Camus, Histoire et procédés, 83. 82. This figure (proposed by Camus) has been disputed. VeyrinForrer and Mercier claim that Saint-Aubin produced 102 plates rather than the 202 he himself suggested. Veyrin-Forrer and Mercier, “������� Contribution à l’étude iconographique,” 27. 83. Mercier, L’argent des révolutionnaires, 31. 84. Ibid., 31. 85. Gatteaux, quoted in Mercier, L’argent des révolutionnaires, 31. 86. Montesquiou, Opinion, 5. 87. Lanthena, Projet pour retirer une grande masse d’assignats, 2. 88. Deperey, Tableau des différentes espèces d’assignats faux, 1. See also Duvaucelles, Observations, 3. 89. Linotte in Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 15 February 1792, quoted in Langlois, La caricature contre-révolutionnaire, 97. 90. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 11. 91. On these images, see Cameron, “Political Exposures,” 90–107; Champfleury, Histoire de la caricature, 98 and 101; Hunt, Family Romance, 99–100; and Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 63–65. 92. See Outram, Body and the French Revolution, 41–67. 93. The format of Boyer-Brun’s weekly Histoire des caricatures, issued from March 1792, which juxtaposed a revolutionary and counterrevolutionary caricature every week, would have encouraged such comparisons and appropriations. 94. Saint-Aubin, L’expedition, 1.

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95. Goudar, L’histoire des Grecs, 2; and Burke, Reflections, 189. 96. Mercier, Le nouveau Paris, vol. 3, 31. 97. Chevalier de Jaucourt, “Jeu,” in Diderot, d’Alembert et al., Encyclopédie, vol. 8, col. 888a. 98. M. M******, Dénonciation faite au public, 21. 99. Levraud, Dissertation médicale, 7.

chapter two

1. See the register in AN F7 3496. On the Chappe telegraph, see Field, “French Optical Telegraphy,” 315–47. 2. AN F7 3496. 3. On the history of passport use in this period, see especially Denis, Histoire de l’identité; and Torpey, Invention of the Passport. On early modern identification protocols, see Groebner, Who Are You? For a wide-ranging set of readings of identity documentation since the Revolution, see the essays in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity. 4. Marin, Portrait of the King, 5. 5. I take this phrase from the discussion of the document in Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, 16. 6. André Chénier, quoted in Sée, Le passeport, 7. 7. Gatteaux, Projet, 3. 8. Gatteaux estimated the cost of this venture at 9,224,629 livres, an expenditure offset by the 481,200 livres per annum he expected to earn in rents. Ibid., 7–8. 9. On the triangle motif, see Leith, “Symbols in the French Revolution,” 105–17. 10. On revolutionary visualizations of surveillance, see Maslan, Revolutionary Acts, 125–82. 11. See too Gatteaux’s design for a medal to be worn by distributors of “public papers,” which featured a prominent eye. BN MED.REVOL. 185. 12. Loi relative aux passe-ports, 6. 13. See Denis, Histoire de l’identité, 53–65, on the problem of “objective” description. 14. Ibid., 23–24. 15. Le Moniteur 210, 29 July 1790, 863. 16. Le Moniteur 222, 10 August 1790, 919. 17. Rousseau, Social Contract, 1. 18. See d’Hartoy, Histoire du passeport, 36. 19. See Ordonnance du Roi. There were of course exceptions during the revolutionary years, such as the passport given to one Guillaume Charpentier, “clockmaker, resident in London,” fifty-three years old, five

foot seven, medium mouth, brown eyes, and “well-made” (bienfait) nose, to travel to London, although given the restrictions on external travel at this time, it seems possible that the bearer’s name was a French adaptation of “William Carpenter” and that he was British. Passport, 25 July 1792 issued to Guillaume Charpentier to travel to London, in BL D. B. 14/5. (1), D. B. 14/5. (2), and D. B. 14/5. (3). 20. See the Relevé des registres des passeports in AN F7 3503. 21. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 21. 22. Diderot, d’Alembert et al., Encyclopédie, vol. 12, 124. 23. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 21–22. 24. On revolutionary bureaucracy, see especially Kafka, “Demon of Writing,” 1–24, and Kingston, “Bricks and Mortar,” 405–23. 25. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 24. 26. Young, Travels in France, 217. 27. See, for instance, Procès-verbaux de visite de nuit de commissaire Vanglenne chez les logeurs où demeurent les juifs, à l’effet de constater la présence de ceux qui n’ont point de passeports ou qui sont suspects, 21 January–30 June 1789, AN Y1 6005. 28. Tisset, Compte rendu aux sans-culottes. 29. Certificate template reproduced in Les Révolutions de Paris 4, 2 to 8 August 1789, 13. 30. See Lefebvre, Great Fear of 1789. 31. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 24. 32. D’Hartoy, Histoire du Passeport, 44. 33. On categories of street life in revolutionary France, see Cobb, Police and the People, 25. 34. On the flight to Varennes, see Tackett, When the King Took Flight. 35. Municipalité de Paris, 3. This document cites the journalistic uproar the proposed emigration caused. For an example, see the sardonic response from the irascible “popular” voice Jean-Bart, in Passe-port donné par Jean-Bart, 1. For a comparison of collective “fears” in 1789 and in the aftermath of Varennes, see Tackett, “Collective Panics,” 149–71. 36. See Hunt, Family Romance, 89–123. 37. Daniel Roche has shown that nine years prior to the Revolution, the average servant or below-average wage earner possessed an average of 6.4 prints or paintings per household. Roche, People of Paris, 223. 38. Although the document has been identified by Antoine de Baecque as a printed law, Claudette Hould states unequivocally that it is a passport. Hould also notes Le Gourmand’s ambivalence and suggests that it indicates émigré frustration at the king’s stupidity as well as outright opposition to revolutionary politics. De Baecque, Caricature révolutionnaire, 181; and Hould, L’image de la Révolution française, 237.

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39. An example of this poster is now on display at the Musée de la Préfecture de Police, Paris. The description reads: “Height about five feet five inches, thin body, limping a bit, large bare forehead, brown hair and eyebrows, long and thin face, marked with little smallpox scars, grey eyes, long nose, medium mouth, long chin, pale features, yellow complexion, black untrimmed beard, with a ponytail.” 40. D’Hartoy, Histoire du passeport français, 47. 41. Torpey, Invention of the Passport, 34. 42. See especially Rosenfeld, Revolution in Language, 123–80. 43. Grégoire, Rapport sur les patois et l’usage de la langue française, 16 prairial an II, AN ADXVIIIC 289, discussed in de Certeau, Julia, and Revel, Une politique de la langue, 156. Grégoire imagined the simplicity of the French language in racial terms, comparing it to the multitude of words used by “the Arab” (315). Contemporary dictionaries noted the revolutionary transformation of language; one satirical edition published in 1791 in “Politicopolis” (Paris) marked with a star system words that were no longer in use, to be removed for the next edition. De l’Épithète, Dictionnaire national et anecdotique, 9. 44. Stafford, Body Criticism, 92. 45. See Freund, “The Citoyenne Tallien,” 325; and Halliday, Facing the Public, 26–82. 46. Sekula, “Body and the Archive,” 7. 47. Décret de la Convention nationale, du 21 janvier 1793, 1. Tom Gretton observes how David’s image is also a portrait of the weapon with which Le Peletier was murdered. It is therefore also a portrait of Pâris. Gretton, “Marat, l’Ami du Peuple,” 36. 48. On these images, see Roy, “Un panthéon,” 50–76. 49. Le Moniteur 359, 29 fructidor year VI (15 September 1798), 1440. 50. Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines, 100. Lajer-Burcharth suggests that the heavy outlines of these images indicate that David may have intended to have them engraved (104). 51. Ibid., 102. 52. Marin, On Representation, 374. 53. See Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 73. 54. See Weston, “Representing the Right to Represent,” 83–100. 55. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 52. 56. Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 255. 57. Ibid., 252–53. 58. Ibid., 255. 59. Republique française. Département du Finistère. District de Brest. Municipalité de Brest. Laisser-passez le C. Joseph George . . . , passport issued 30 prairial an II, in Grigsby, Extremities, 37.

60. Grigsby, Extremities, 37. 61. Bellenger, “‘Trop savant pour nous,’” 28. 62. Ibid., 27. 63. AN F7 3570. 64. Barthes, “Death of the Author,” 142. 65. Debauve, “Les vignettes révolutionnaires,” 367. On revolutionary vignettes, see also Boppe and Bonnet, Les vignettes emblématiques; Liris, “Autour des vignettes révolutionnaires,” 307–16; Chansard, “Les rapports du discours et de la symbolique dans les vignettes révolutionnaires,” 317–22; and Raux, Les vignettes emblématiques. 66. Debauve, “Les vignettes révolutionnaires,” 371. 67. Monnot, Rapport, 3. 68. Ibid., 9. 69. Bernard, Notice historique, 58. This appeal can be read in the Décret du 11 août 1792. 70. Ibid., 76. 71. Ibid, 77–80. 72. Alexandre-Jacques-Laurent Anisson-Duperron, L’auditeur au conseil d’état, inspecteur de l’Imprimerie Nationale, Paris, le 15 juin 1810, letter in AN F7 3494. 73. Ibid. 74. See the letter documenting engraver Charles-César Petit’s denunciation of unknown people who had requested, on the day of the 1792 Festival of the Federation, that he make them a fake assignat plate. Petit was accused of having false identity documents. AN F7 4590. 75. Décret de la Convention nationale, du 26 février 1793. 76. Lüsebrink and Reichardt, Bastille, 87. 77. See Romi, Livre de raison du patriote Palloy, 69. 78. See Lüsebrink and Reichardt, Bastille, 96. 79. Lucas, “Crowds and Politics,” 282. Elsewhere, however, complaints arose about the lack of distinction afforded to vainqueurs in revolutionary ceremonials. See anecdotal evidence in Ambroise Rillatte, Grande confédération entre les Bretons et les vainqueurs de la Bastille sur la route de Rambouillet (n.d.), cited in Tourneux, Bibliographie, 203, document 1702. 80. Poupart-Beaubourg, Quatre mille huit cents liv. a gagner. 81. Latude, Le despotisme dévoilé. 82. Lüsebrink and Reichardt, Bastille, 112–16, offers an account of Latude’s story. 83. Mercier, Le nouveau Paris, vol. 1, 159–60. For an analysis of the representation of the destruction of the statue, see Clay, “Bouchardon’s Statue of Louis XV,” 93–122.

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84. Mercier, Le nouveau Paris, vol. 1, 160–61. 85. Latude, Projet de coalition.

chapter three

1. On Hauer, see Walczak, “Low Art, Popular Imagery,” 247–77. 2. Renouvier, Histoire de l’art pendant la Révolution, 416. 3. Robespierre, Rapport fait au nom du comité de salut public, […] séance du 18 floréal. 4. La Révolution française et l’Europe, vol. 3, 728; Hunt, Politics, 112; Jouffre, Fêtes et Révolution, 62; and Ramette, L’architecture ephemère, 71. 5. Renouvier, Histoire de l’art pendant la Révolution, 416. 6. On the historiography of the revolutionary festival, see Ozouf, Festivals, 13–32. Other important texts on festivals include Bercé, Fête et révolte; Biver, Fêtes révolutionnaires; Dowd, Pageant-Master of the Republic; and Ehrard and Viallaneix, Les fêtes de la Révolution. 7. On the debate in 1880 over the correct date on which to remember the Revolution, 14 July 1789, 4 August 1789, or 10 August 1792, see Ozouf, “Le premier 14 juillet,” 10–19. 8. Ozouf, Festivals. 9. On festival imagery, see important contributions in Etlin, “Architecture and the Festival of Federation,” 23–42; Jouffre, Fêtes et Révolution; Ozouf, “Le simulacre et la fête,” 323–53; and de la Vaissière, “La Fédération des français,” 16–33. 10. Notable exceptions are the festivals organized in Paris and Sceaux by Pierre-François Palloy as well as several festivals organized in collaboration between individuals and the state, such as that held at Ris on 8 August 1790 by Anisson-Duperron, director of the Imprimerie Nationale. See correspondence relating to this at BN Mss. fonds français 11697, fols. 73 and 74. 11. See Hould, L’image de la Révolution française, 63–113, on freedoms afforded to revolutionary printmakers. 12. Procès-verbal historique de la journée du 14, 6. 13. See Ozouf, “Les cortèges révolutionnaires,” 889–916. 14. Mona Ozouf in Furet and Ozouf, Dictionnaire critique, 177. 15. Lambert, Les Fédérations en Franche-Comté, i. For more complex responses to the vogue for civic oath-taking in contemporary fiction, see Douthwaite, “On Candide, Catholics, and Freemasonry,” 81–117. 16. Révolutions de France et de Brabant 35, 26 July 1790, 501–2; and Davallon, “Les fêtes révolutionnaires,” 187. 17. L’ordre, la marche, et les cérémonies, 1. 18. For instance, the final stanza of the speech given on the Champ de Mars during the Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic,

10 August 1792, described a Republic “that humanity has made responsible for its cause, and that must save the whole world.” Recueil des six discours, 7. 19. Le pardon générale, 1. 20. See, for instance, an appeal for the release of six debtors imprisoned at la Force that advanced its case by demanding that the freedoms of the Federation be upheld. Adresse aux bons citoyens, 1–2. 21. See Les vues d’optique, 235–40. 22. Jacques-François Blondel’s influential Cours d’architecture (1771–77) had included a lengthy section on the construction of such structures. 23. See Corbin, Village Bells, 3–44. 24. See Campbell, “Jean-Guillaume Moitte,” 48–60. Moitte’s designs were the focus of an engraved prospectus of 1792 by Joubert (BN Qb1790, 1792). Joubert later presented an engraving by Massard of Moitte’s designs to the National Assembly for exhibition in the legislative chamber, prompting Quatremère de Quincy to propose that Joubert be given honorable mention in the Assembly’s procès-verbal and to later commission Moitte to design the frieze for the Panthéon. 25. This comparison is made in Roberts, Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis Prieur, 1136–37. 26. Oscar Reutersvärd attributes the squat, or “sunken,” proportions of Cellerier’s arch to a little-understood practice inherited from his master Ledoux, who adapted it from Roman models, particularly the Circus of Maxentius. Reutersvärd, “De Sjunkna Bägarna,” 98–117. Etlin suggests that the proportions of the arch were intended to express a military caractère. Etlin, “Architecture and the Festival of Federation,” 28. 27. Gruber, Les grandes fêtes, 150. Pascal de la Vaissière has claimed that “the partisan feelings raised by the historical content of the prints also hinder their appreciation. How to exorcise the Revolution?” See L’art de l’estampe et la Révolution française, 3. 28. Hould, “Les Tableaux historiques,” 14. 29. Etlin, “Architecture and the Festival of Federation,” 29. 30. Barère, quoted in Ozouf, L’école de la France, 33. 31. D***, Songe patriotique. 32. Jouffre, “Le chantier national,” 48; see also Mainz, L’image du travail, 153–62. 33. Jean-Paul Marat, in particular, inveighed against the antirevolutionary nature of the military procession: “We see there with more surprise still the mortal enemies of the Revolution, the officer corps of troops, the mounted police, the commissioners of war, the guards of the king and the princes, the marshals of France, these worthy supporters of

176 | notes to pages 68–78

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executive power, invited to come and perjure themselves on the altars of liberty, pledging to defend to the last breath the constitution they long to overturn.” Le Junius Français 9, 12 June 1790, 2. 34. Lambert, Les Fédérations en Franche-Comté, 29. 35. APP AA, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de Police, Section du Muséum, 9 and 10 July 1790. For concern about the ménagerie on the Avenue des Invalides, see Chronique de Paris, 10 July 1790, 763, which demanded its removal to a different site. 36. Talleyrand (7 June 1790), quoted in Lambert, Les Fédérations en Franche-Comté, 30. 37. The Encyclopédie had complained of the regularity of religious festivals and the “opportunities for debauchery and licentiousness” that accompanied them. Diderot, d’Alembert, et al., Encyclopédie, vol. 6, 565. Religious festivals were objected to for both philosophical reasons and practical ones, such as the increase in begging they caused. See, for instance, François Alexandre Frédéric de Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Mémoire proposant la supression d’une certain nombre des fêtes dans la diocèse de Paris, AN F16 936. On the suppression of the carnival, see correspondence from Bailly to Lafayette, 10 February 1790, BN Mss. fonds français 11697, fol. 36v; and the request from police to uphold the banning of masks, 10 February 1790, BN Mss. nouv. acq. fr. 2671, fol. 142 and Chronique de Paris, 4 February 1790. 38. See Etlin, “Architecture and the Festival of Federation,” 25–26. 39. Several of these architects submitted proposals for later festivals too. See, for instance, that by Poyet, in a letter of 16 April 1792, BN Mss. nouv. acq. fr. 2657, fol. 14. 40. Ramette, L’architecture ephemère, 52. 41. Confédération nationale ou récit exact, 51, year II. Blondel argued that the Champ de Mars was a collaborative effort, with Cellerier becoming involved relatively late after Mandar had suggested the plot and Blondel had begun initial design. Observations du sieur Blondel. 42. Jouffre, “Le chantier national,” 57. 43. Chronique de Paris, 30 June 1790. 44. A manuscript note on Michel’s sketch by the engraver DuplessiBertaux, who owned it, states that “I was there and guarantee that it is an exact sketch.” 45. On the carnivalesque see, recently, Trévien, “Le monde à l’envers,” 34–52. 46. Restif de la Bretonne, Les nuits de Paris, 61. 47. Mercier de Compeigne, La Fédération, vii. 48. Ibid., vii. 49. Letter from Brongniart to Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun, 20 July

1790, quoted in Silvestre de Sacy, Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, 76. For Etlin, Girardet’s “frieze-like” representation of events in the Tableaux historiques is compatible with Brongniart’s description. Etlin, “Architecture and the Festival of Federation,” 38n40. 50. Several popular songs referred to women’s “civic duty” to make themselves sexually available to the heroes of the Revolution. See the dialogue (sung to the tune of the Marseillaise) between a man and a woman who offers “favors” to vainqueurs in Les héros français, au sexe républicain, in Cercey, Recueil de chansons, 8. 51. Confédération nationale, ou récit exact (1790), 66. This description is lifted directly from Révolutions de France et de Brabant 34, 14 July 1790, 462. Richard Wrigley documents similar sartorial behavior at the 1791 Panthéonisation of Voltaire. Wrigley, Politics of Appearances, 193. 52. Hunt, Family Romance, 43. 53. On these images, distributed in 1767 by the order of Louis XV, see de Baecque, Body Politic, 37. 54. Although the sentiment of the song was conciliatory, its words changed regularly and often encompassed hostile references. Mason, “Ça Ira and the Birth of the Revolutionary Song,” 27. 55. See the restrictions on masking and disguise placed on a privately organized ball at the Palais-Royal in 1791, APP AA, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de police, Section de Butte-des-Moulins, 8 January 1791. See also des Essarts, Dictionnaire universel de police, vol. 6, 363, and Johnson, “Versailles, Meet Les Halles,” 89–116. 56. Description de la fête du pacte fédératif, 6–8. 57. Unfortunately, eighteen fédérés and two women were reported to have drowned crossing the Seine in their eagerness to get a better view of the festival. D’Alméras, La vie parisienne, 39. 58. APP AA, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de police, Section de Montmartre, 15 July 1790. On subversions of the National Guard uniform, see Wrigley, Politics of Appearances, 59–96. 59. Ozouf, Festivals, 209n13. 60. Michelet, History of the French Revolution, 454. 61. Restif de la Bretonne, Les nuits de Paris, 63. 62. Hunt, Family Romance, 46. 63. Lanoa, La vérite sans fard, 3. 64. Tableau et détails de l’ordre, de la marche et des cérémonies, 6. 65. Plan, allégories et inscriptions, 2; and Couplets patriotiques, unpaginated. 66. Couplets patriotiques, unpaginated. 67. Freud, “On Transience,” 287–89. 68. Canetti, Crowds and Power, 63.

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69. The focus shifted to satires of the monarchy and the clergy between 1791 and 1792 and to representations of the Republic between 1793 and 1794. The Federation was among the most popular subjects for prints exhibited at the 1791 Salon. Hunt, “Engraving the Republic,” 14. 70. Fédération des français dans la capitale d’empire, 2. 71. Ibid., 3. 72. Ibid., 4; Peter Jones records evidence of a print of the Federation in the inventory of a British revolutionary sympathizer, demonstrating the European diffusion of such images. Jones, “‘England Expects . . . ,’” 189. 73. Ibid., 5. 74. Anniversaire, ou journal de ce qui s’est passé, 19. 75. Confédération nationale, ou récit exact (1790), 65. 76. Le Moniteur 198, 17 July 1790, 1. Advertises an engraving titled Le patriotisme armé protégera la liberté légale, a print “in medallion form relating to the Federation,” sold by Jolly for 24 sous. This print is at BN Qb-1 1790-FOL. 77. Anniversaire, ou journal de ce qui s’est passé, vii. 78. Ozouf, quoted in Kaplan, Farewell Revolution, 19. 79. On the pedagogical role of maps of the Federation, see Vovelle, La Révolution française, vol. 1, 121–23. 80. Landes, Visualizing the Nation, 85. 81. Ramette, L’architecture ephemère, 36. 82. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 84. 83. Barthes, “Eiffel Tower,” 10. 84. Ibid., 11. 85. See Crary, “Géricault, the Panorama,” 5–25. 86. Thébaud-Sorger, “Les premiers ballons,” 161–62. 87. Jules Michelet, Women of the French Revolution, 80, in Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 161. Landes notes the irony of this statement in the context of women’s passive role in revolutionary festivals.

chapter four

Epigraph: Wordsworth, The Prelude, 242. 1. On late eighteenth-century transformations of categories of “selfhood,” see especially Goldstein, Post-Revolutionary Self. 2. An exception is Lüsebrink and Reichardt’s excellent The Bastille. Reichardt’s recent L’imagerie révolutionnaire de la Bastille also pays significant attention to Palloy. Other relevant works are Babelon, “Les maquettes et les pierres de la Bastille,” 217–30; Fournel, Le patriote Palloy et l’exploitation de la Bastille; Lemoine, Le démolisseur de la Bastille; Romi, Livre de raison du patriote Palloy; and very recently, Bocher, Démolir la Bastille.

3. Rancière, Short Voyages, 18. 4. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, 127. 5. Ibid., 107. 6. See Dubin, Futures and Ruins. 7. Ozouf, Festivals, 158. 8. Alain Weil recounts the twenty titles that appeared on letters sent to Palloy stored at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (cote 601254): Architecte; Architecte-entrepreneur; Architecte national; Architect chargé de la démolition de la Bastille; Artiste; Entrepreneur; Entrepreneur des Bâtiments; Entrepreneur des Bâtiments du Roi; Entrepreneur des travaux de la Bastille; Entrepreneur de la Démolition de la Bastille; Grenadier volontaire; Grenadier de la Garde Nationale; Grenadier Volontaire de la 1ere division (de la Garde Nationale Parisienne); Maître Maçon; Maître Maçon de la Verrerie du Roy; Patriote; Citoyen patriote; Patriote et entrepreneur d’ouvrages; Patriote chargé de la démolition de la Bastille; and Sculpteur. Weil, Histoire et numismatique du patriote Palloy, 14. 9. See Palloy’s annotated manuscript of his autobiography, AP 4 AZ 719. 10. For material relating to the demolition of the Bastille (1789–year V), see AN F13 1242. See also Arrêté de l’Assemblée des représentants de la commune ordonnant la vente aux enchères sur affiches, des plombs, fers, bois de charpente et menuiserie, et autres matériaux, pierres exceptées, provenant de la démolition de la Bastille, 14 August 1789, AN H1 960. 11. Reichardt, L’imagerie révolutionnaire de la Bastille, 139. 12. See the account received by Palloy in April 1790 from the locksmith Deumier, relating the work he had done on a replica of the Bastille deposited at the Hôtel de Ville. BN Mss. nouv. acq. fr. 3241, fol. 130. 13. Palloy also planned to send his “Bastilles” overseas to France’s colonies. Procès-verbal de ce qui s’est passé a la séance du 13 novembre 1790, 4. 14. Bulletins hebdomadaires de la censure, 1810 et 1814, referenced by Charles Thurot in Revue Critique (1871), quoted in Taine, Les origines de la France contemporaine, vol. 9, 89n1. 15. See Lüsebrink, “Prise de parole populaire,” 295–304. 16. Palloy, Pétition faite à la barre de la Convention nationale, le 9 août 1793, 3. 17. Palloy, Discours prononcé en présence des bataillons de volontaires et citoyens d’Epernay, le 23 Septembre 1792, 59; and Palloy, Palloy, à ses frères de la Société des amis de la Constitution républicaine de Sceaux-l’Unité, 11. Palloy also claimed involvement in the arrest of the king at Sainte-­

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Menehould in 1791. Although he learned early of the king’s flight and attempted to be the first to relay the news, a surgeon named Mangin from Chalons was in fact the first to do so. 18. Palloy, Pétition faite à la barre de la Convention nationale, le 9 août 1793, 2. 19. See, for instance, “I will always be an incorruptible patriot, more reliable than the Bastille,” in Palloy, Discours prononcé en présence des bataillons de volontaires et citoyens d’Epernay, le 23 Septembre 1792, 11. 20. In 1792 Palloy donated twenty-three volumes of his correspondence from the beginning of the Revolution to the Legislative Assembly, indicating an awareness of his own historical trajectory. Palloy, Petition faite à la barre de l’Assemblée Législative, le 11 mars 1792. 21. Weil, Histoire et numismatique du patriote Palloy, 3. 22. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 1–11. 23. See Rubin, “Disorder/Order,” 83–111. 24. Nochlin, Body in Pieces, 8. 25. Procès-verbal de ce qui s’est passé a la séance du 13 novembre 1790, 15; and Lüsebrink and Reichardt, Bastille, 4. 26. Jourdan, “Politique artistique et Révolution française,” 405. 27. Palloy, Adresse et projet général, 61. 28. Ibid., 61. 29. Potofsky, Constructing Paris, xiii–xiv. 30. Ibid., 96–145. See also Dubin, Futures and Ruins, 109–50. 31. See the fragment of paper, signed by Palloy, outlining a plan for a combined Bastille stone and medal, in AP 4 AZ 719. 32. Palloy, Adresse et projet général, 6. 33. Ibid., 60–61. 34. AN 364, planche I, séances des 6 messidor et 18 messidor an II, quoted in Jourdan, “Politique artistique et Révolution française,” 402. 35. Only the lid of the domino set remains. Presented to the dauphin on 1 January 1790, the box and dominoes were allegedly lost on 10 August 1792. MC OM 520. 36. Lüsebrink and Reichardt, Bastille, 133. 37. Procès-verbal de ce qui s’est passé a la séance du 13 novembre 1790, 4. 38. Monsaingeon, “Le citoyen Palloy, ” 127–34. See also Menard, “Le château, la forteresse,” 291–97. 39. See Reichardt, “Light Against Darkness,” 95–148. 40. Taussig, Defacement, 3–4. 41. See Van Der Hoorn, “Exorcizing Remains,” 189–213. 42. Plan de la Bastille offert à l’Assemblée Nationale, le jour du pacte fédératif, 14 juillet 1790, AN C35 2982. 43. Ozouf, “Space and Time,” 376–77.

44. Williams, Letters Written in France, 22. 45. Smith, “Elementary Forms,” 26. 46. Palloy, Pétition à l’Assemblée Nationale, relative au cérémonial à observer, 1–3. 47. Kersaint, Discours prononcé au conseil du département de Paris, unpaginated. 48. On this print, see Duprat, “Das Schicksal einer politischen Graphik,” 313–25. 49. Détail de l’horrible assassinat, commis hier au soir au champ de la Fédération, 5; and Fureur du Père Duchêne, contre les soixante calotins, 2. The latter text identifies the attackers as “apprentices in hypocrisy, from the rue Saint-Jacques,” most probably young theology students from the “écoles barbares.” Ruault, Gazette d’un parisien, 251. 50. Jourdan, “Statues de plâtre . . . Statues de plomb,” 36. 51. Gence, Vues sur les fêtes publiques, 3–4; and Bénézech, Instruction sur la célébration des fêtes nationales, 4–5. 52. Ozouf, “Le simulacre et la fête révolutionnaire,” 324. 53. Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, 64. See also Starobinski, J.-J. Rousseau, 301. 54. These debates are discussed at length in Friedland, Political Actors; and Maslan, Revolutionary Acts. 55. Le Moniteur 297, 27 messidor year II (15 July 1794), 210. 56. Ordre, marche, et détail des céremonies pour la Fédération du 10 août 1793, 7. On David’s role in festivals, see especially Dowd, Pageant-Master of the Republic. 57. Le Vieux Cordelier 4, 30 frimaire year II (20 December 1793), 51. David had proposed, on 17 brumaire year II (7 November 1793), to preserve the allegories of the Festival of Reunion of 10 August 1793 in order to make a statue fifteen meters tall of the French people destroying idols of tyranny and superstition. This would be made from symbolically appropriated bronze melted down from enemy cannon. 58. Hunt, Politics, 64. 59. See Ozouf, Festivals, 209–11. 60. Le nouveau diable boiteaux, 88–89. 61. Bénézech, Instruction sur la célébration des fêtes nationales, 4–5. 62. Reveillière-Lépeaux, Réflexions sur le culte, 35. 63. David, Ordre et marche de la fête de l’unité et de l’indivisibilité de la République, 7. 64. The drapery on the statue of Atheism, set alight by Robespierre, had been treated by the artificier Ruggieri to make it burn. See the bill for services in AN F4 2090, paid one year after the event. 65. AN F4 1968. See also Langlois, “L’invention de la liberté,” 114.

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66. Dupont de Nemours, Lettre de M. duPont, a M. Petion, 4. Original italics. 67. Grand détail de toutes les rejouissances et cérémonies qui auront lieu demain, premier mai, 4; Gence, Vues sur les fêtes publiques, 10; and Dialogue entre la France et la Liberté, 3. 68. See Ozouf, Festivals, 83–102. 69. Enterrement du despotisme, ou funérailles des aristocrates, 7. 70. Diderot, d’Alembert, et al., Encyclopédie, vol. 15, 205–6. 71. Ozouf, “Le simulacre et la fête,” 328. Some contemporary dictionaries also translated the word as “ghost.” Nugent, New Pocket Dictionary, 283. 72. Ozouf, “Le simulacre et la fête,” 341. 73. Palloy, Discours prononcé en présence des bataillons de volontaires et citoyens d’Epernay, le 23 septembre 1792, 17 74. Ibid., 57. 75. De Goncourts, Histoire de la société française, 38. On the de Goncourts’ fascination with revolutionary objects, see Stammers, “Bric-a-Brac,” 309. 76. On Palloy’s fraternal meals, another example of his gift-giving, see Lüsebrink and Reichardt, Bastille, 126. 77. Procès-verbal du cérémonial et des discours prononcés par différents membres des corps administratifs réunis de la ville d’Épernay, 4. See also Wright, “‘L’éducation par les yeux,’” 153–71. 78. Procès-verbal de ce qui s’est passé a la séance du 13 novembre 1790, 12. 79. Ibid., 13. 80. La République une et indivisible, ou la mort. Extrait du procès-­ verbal des délibérations du conseil du département du Loiret, 1. On the reception of the Bastille stones, see also various documents in AP 4 AZ 719. 81. Le Moniteur 197, 16 juillet 1790, 130; Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée Nationale, du mecredi 14 juillet 1790, vol. 25. 82. Révolutions de France et de Brabant 34, 14 July 1790, 457–58. 83. See Rivière and Adhémar, French Popular Imagery; Images de confréries de la collection de M Louis Ferrand; and Gaston, Les images des confréries parisiennes. 84. Lesaffre-Ramette, “Une fête révolutionnaire provinciale,” 790. 85. See Benzaken, “Iconographie des monnaies et médailles de la Fédération,” 277–86. 86. Adieux des fédérés a leurs frères les citoyens de Paris, 1. For an example of advice literature, see Avis aux confédérés des LXXXIII départemens, which purported to be by the hand of Rétif de la Bretonne. 87. Ozouf, Festivals, 57.

88. Palloy, Le patriote Palloy à ses concitoyens. An account of his defense against these accusations is presented in Palloy, Palloy, à ses frères de la Société des amis de la Constitution républicaine de Sceaux-l’Unité, 1–16. 89. Dubin, Futures and Ruins, 136. 90. Procès-verbal de ce qui s’est passé a la séance du 13 novembre 1790, 8. 91. Stewart, On Longing, 135. 92. Ibid., 136. 93. Ibid., 136. 94. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1–25. 95. Mauss, General Theory of Magic, 43. 96. Kubler, Shape of Time, 72. 97. Jean-Lambert Tallien, in Fête civique sur les ruines de la Bastille, 8.

chapter five

Epigraph: De Goncourts, L’art du dix-huitième siècle, 275. 1. Ibid., 279. 2. On Debucourt’s awareness of clothing as a marker of status and periodization, see the fifty-two prints representing fashionable life under the Directory, Consulate, and Empire, in Modes et manières du jour à Paris. 3. See also the works in Mainz and Williams, Sensing Sculpture. 4. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 5. 5. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” 260. 6. Aside from the Goncourts, the main secondary sources on Debucourt are Bouchot, Les artistes célèbres. P.-L. Debucourt; Exposition Debucourt: Catalogue des tableaux, dessins, gravures; Fenaille, L’oeuvre gravé du P.-L. Debucourt; and Salaman, in P.-L. Debucourt. The exhibition Colorful Impressions, which opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in 2003, went some way toward redressing the recent neglect of Debucourt’s work, including ten of his prints. See Grasselli et al., Colorful Impressions. 7. Although Boilly was in fact only six years younger than Debucourt, as Susan Siegfried points out, he undoubtedly made a better transition to postrevolutionary life than Debucourt and many of his contemporaries. Siegfried, Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly, 33. 8. Emile Dacier, in Exposition Debucourt, 8. 9. After 1785 Debucourt did not exhibit work at the Salon again until 1810, but he made further appearances in 1814, 1817, 1824, and 1829. On the revolutionary taste for Dutch-influenced genre painting, see Eliel, “Genre Painting During the Revolution,” 47–61. 10. L’impartialité au sallon, dédiée à M. M. les critiques présens et à

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venir (1783) and La patte de velours, pour servir de suite à la seconde édition du coup de patte, ouvrage concernant le sallon de peinture (1781) in Fenaille, L’oeuvre gravé de P.-L. Debucourt, p. vi, n. 3 and p. v, n. 2. Fenaille actually attributes the authorship of the anonymous La patte de velours to Carmontelle. For the case for Lefébure’s authorship, see Wrigley, Origins of French Art Criticism, 360–62. 11. At this time Debucourt lived in a three-room apartment at the Louvre, where he stayed for twelve and a half years thanks to the generosity of the sculptor Louis-Philippe Mouchy, his father-in-law, who had listed the apartment as a condition of Debucourt’s marriage contract. The address of this apartment is frequently listed on Debucourt’s prints, including Almanach national: “Cour du Louvre, la cinquième porte à gauche en entrant par le Colonade, au premier.” The marriage contract is reproduced in Fenaille, L’oeuvre gravé de P.-L. Debucourt, 323–27. 12. See Smentek, “An Exact Imitation,” 9–21; and Smentek, “Sex, Sentiment, and Speculation,” 220–43, especially pages 228–29 on the marketing of Debucourt’s prints. 13. See Faliu, “Le calculateur patriote,” 11–20. Debucourt’s personal politics were inconsistent to say the least, and he produced works that glorified, successively, Louis XVI, the Revolution, Napoleon, and the Restoration. 14. On the early history of the Paris Jacobin Club, see Kennedy, Jacobin Clubs. 15. Bordes, “Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Serment du Jeu de Paume,’” 19–25. 16. Furthermore, David had begun work on the project some time before he sought sponsorship from the Jacobins, at least six months before Dubois-Crancé’s positively received October 1790 speech to the Société proposing that funds for the painting be raised by civic subscription, a speech that was actually written by David himself. Bordes, “Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Serment du Jeu de Paume,’” 20. 17. Bordes, Le serment du jeu de paume, 100n86. 18. Maurice Vaucaire in Fenaille, L’oeuvre gravé de P.-L. Debucourt, xi. Debucourt’s first wife, Mouchy’s daughter and great-niece of the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, died in 1783, the year he began printmaking in earnest, and Debucourt raised his son on a five-hundred-livres pension inherited from Pigalle until his son’s death at the age of eighteen in 1801. Ralph Nevill suggested that despite his middle-class upbringing, Debucourt lived a life that was anything but bourgeois. Although Debucourt was made a member of the Institut de France in 1817, he obtained few commissions in later life and died in penury in Belleville in 1832. Nevill, French Prints, 51.

19. Hunt, Measuring Time, 68. 20. On the reception of the décadi, see Bianchi, “‘La bataille du calendrier,’” 245–64. 21. For an analysis of the Republican calendar in the context of eighteenth-century notions of “new time,” with particular attention to the calendar’s slow decline, see Perovic, “French Republican Calendar,” 1–20. 22. Zerubavel, “French Republican Calendar,” 873. 23. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 4–5. 24. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 253. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Despite the Revolution’s conscious attempt to homogenize the measurement of time, these enterprises were not experienced equally according to geographical location or social status. On this subject, see Shaw, “Reactions to the French Republican Calendar,” 4–25. 28. Shaw, Time and the French Revolution, 14. 29. On this image, see Reichardt, L’imagerie révolutionnaire, 172–73. 30. Andrews, “Making the Revolutionary Calendar,” 515. On the distinction between prophesy and prognosis, see Koselleck, Futures Past, 18–19. 31. See, for example, Almanach de Trou-Madame. In 1789 the publisher of this almanac, Cuchet, also turned his hand to a two-volume “almanach national,” to be sold alongside more traditional or satirical forms. See the request in AN V1 553. 32. Bailleul, Almanach des bizarreries humaines, 3. 33. Andries, “Almanacs,” 206. 34. Ibid., 205. 35. Andries notes that although the traditional almanac “prevailed throughout the revolutionary period as a whole,” during the Terror, between 1793 and 1795, 73 percent of almanacs were political in nature. Andries, “Almanacs,” 210. 36. Andrews, “Making the Revolutionary Calendar,” 516. 37. Ibid. The rules of the contest explicitly suggested that it should be aimed at a rural audience. See also Collot’s presentation of the almanac at the Legislative Assembly on 18 December 1791, in AN C 140, no. 126. 38. Perovic, “French Republican Calendar,” 8. 39. On the history of the almanac as a site of artistic value and experimentation, see Champier, Les anciens almanacs illustrés. For a comprehensive history of French almanacs, see especially Grand-­ Carteret, Les almanachs français; also Johnson, “Popular French Almanacs,” 139–54, and Welschinger, Les almanachs de la Révolution.

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40. Shaw, “Time and the French Revolution,” 42. 41. See Andries, “Almanacs,” 203–22; and Gaspard, “Les almanachs de l’an II,” 141–59. 42. This sense of transitoriness was echoed in textual form in many other almanacs produced in 1790, the first year that the almanac form was able to take account of the events of the previous year. See, for instance, L’almanach des métamorphoses nationales. 43. Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable, 37. See the accounts of revolutionary attempts to regenerate monumental space in Jourdan, Les monuments de la Révolution; Leith, Space and Revolution; and Naginski, Sculpture and Enlightenment. 44. Debucourt’s “monument” bears some striking similarities to eighteenth-century French chimneypiece designs, which were similarly divided, the lower half containing a marble-framed fireplace and the upper half being typically comprised of a large mirror. This association, which makes the exterior location of the scene problematic, invokes a domestic register enhanced by the presence of the children and by the intended siting of the almanac image in a prominent position in French homes. The implication may be that the institutions of the Revolution provide a new kind of familial “architecture,” the domestic hearth on a grand scale. 45. Susan Siegfried has remarked on Debucourt’s pioneering approach to the representation of the street, whereby “there is no privileged view of the street and no complete view either,” a dislocated position that came to be typical of nineteenth-century art. Siegfried, Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly, 136. 46. The livre rouge contained details of the secret expenses, indemnities, and pensions given by the French royal family under the reigns of Louis XV and XVI. 47. Some almanacs from the same year went further in their public identification of the representatives. See, for instance, Almanach des adresses de Paris or Almanach des députés à l’Assemblée Nationale. On the printed representation of members of the National Assembly, see Freund, “Legislative Body,” 337–58. 48. Hould, L’image de la Révolution française, 386. 49. Lefebvre’s example was the revolutionary symbols decorating the Napoleonic Arc de Triomphe. Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, 21–22. 50. Chénier, Hymne pour la fête de la Fédération, 4. 51. Romme, Rapport sur l’ère de la République, 2. 52. Michel Vovelle has remarked on the comparable pedagogical aims of the Festival of the Federation and Collot d’Herbois’s Almanach du Père Gérard of 1791. Vovelle, “Iconography,” 5.

53. On the revolutionary press, see Popkin, Revolutionary News. 54. De Goncourts, Histoire de la société française, 252, 264. Popkin observes that the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale lists 184 periodicals launched in Paris in 1789 and 335 in 1790. Readers were frequently able to choose from more than one hundred political journals, although most of these publications were short-lived and the actual number of journals of any significance was likely much smaller. Popkin, “Journals,” 150. 55. Siegfried, Art of Louis-Léopold Boilly, 51. 56. “It will be my almanac. I am however very piqued that M. de Bucourt, painter of the academy, draughtsman and engraver of this work, which is clever and worthy of the Jacobins, has neglected to place the Révolutions de Brabant, which had the honor to illuminate the bile of Malouet and Dupont, and of Stanislas Clermont and Mirabeau-the-Barrel, on the colporteur’s shop and among the multitude of patriotic newspapers whose titles one reads. I hope that M. de Bucourt will repair this omission next year. I find the idea of this Almanach so pleasing and so well executed that I want to introduce myself and extend to the author my utmost courtesies.” Révolutions de France et de Brabant 59, 10 January 1791, 339–40. 57. Derrida, Truth in Painting, particularly 17–147. 58. On the French Revolution’s excessive enthusiasm for paper, see Mercier, Le nouveau Paris, vol. 4, 77–84. 59. Bouchot, Les artistes célèbres: P.-L. Debucourt, 46. The Minerva letterhead was in use from the founding of the Institut in 1795 and is still employed as a logo for the institution. On the use of allegorical figures on letterheads, see especially de Baecque, “Allegorical Image of France,” 111–43; and Hunt, Politics, 87–119. 60. Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 34. 61. For readings of this image, see Goodman, Becoming a Woman, 40–41; and Mainardi, Husbands, Wives, and Lovers, 109–10. 62. A work described by Alan Wintermute as “arguably the greatest color print of the century.” Wintermuter 1789: French Art During the Revolution, 134. 63. On the dynamic relationship between these paintings, see especially Crow, Emulation, 47–81. 64. Shami, “Prehistories of Globalization,” 220. 65. On Debucourt’s Calendrier républicain, see Mainz, L’image du travail, 181–84. 66. Debucourt also produced a Droits de l’homme et du citoyen in grisaille as a pendant to his Calendrier républicain. 67. French Caricature, 227. 68. The text of the advertisement reads: “To bring together an

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indispensable object of use with an engraving, which through its composition is likely to decorate the homes of French citizens, such is the goal of that which is proposed in this advertisement—an architectural monument in variously colored marble forms the background and presents a forepart [avant-propos] where the calendar for 1791, 3rd year of Liberty, is engraved; above it is an allegorical bronze bas-relief set against a background of marble, the National Assembly on a base constructed from the debris of the Bastille.” Journal de Paris, 7 January 1791, quoted in Fenaille, L’oeuvre gravé de P.-L. Debucourt, 28. 69. The first state of Gillot’s print can be seen at Waddesdon Manor, Rothschild Collection, no. 4322.2.22.35. For a subsequent state of the image with the allegorical scene attached, see BM 1882,0812.462. 70. Such variation is most apparent in a print after Debucourt by Augustin Legrand that appeared in three versions, in 1789, 1794, and 1797, each with a very different political message. The first, titled Vive le roy, represents a traveling colporteur presenting a printed portrait of the king. In the second, Réception du décret du 18 floréal, the theme of the print within a print has become revolutionary, while the third variant, Traité de paix avec l’Empire, replaces this interior content with a Napoleonic image. On prints by Debucourt representing prints, see Taylor, “Engravings Within Engravings,” 59–70. 71. Fenaille, L’oeuvre gravé de P.-L. Debucourt, 28. 72. De Goncourts, L’art du dix-huitième siècle, 279. 73. Barry, “Walking on Water,” 630–631. 74. Ibid. Of course, paper was also a composite material, composed of a hardened liquid form; in fact, it possessed many of the attributes that were thought to be characteristic of marble. 75. D’Holbach, “Marbre,” in Diderot, d’Alembert, et al., Encyclopédie, vol. 10, 70. 76. Ibid., 71. 77. This “openness” and the status of marble as a noniconographic but rather visual or even aesthetic category that “became the instrument par excellence of the virtual, that is, of memory, which is to say, of a beyond” has been subject to a virtuoso interpretation in Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, 10. 78. Momoro, Traité élémentaire de l’imprimerie, 231–32. 79. Fenaille, L’oeuvre gravé de P.-L. Debucourt, 27. 80. See Stoichita, Self-Aware Image. 81. Debucourt himself made advertising imagery that was appropriated for the design of trade cards. See the trade card for the grocer Corcellet (BM Heal, 133.103), after a shop sign at the Musée Carnavalet (MC En.132), a version of which was also painted by Boilly.

82. Griffiths, Prints for Books, 140. 83. See Germer, “In Search of a Beholder,” 29; and Kemp, “Death at Work,” 107. 84. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 135. 85. Koselleck, Futures Past, 50. 86. For instance, Époques les plus intéressantes des Révolutions de Paris.

chapter six

Epigraph: Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” 92. 1. Spang, “Ghost of Law,” 4. 2. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” 37. Of the substantial literature on trauma, I would draw particular attention to Naginski, “Canova’s Penitent Magdalene,” which addresses the traumatic effects of the Revolution’s break with the past. 3. See accounts of the ceremony in Le Moniteur 150, 30 pluviôse year IV (19 February 1796), 473; Bruguière, Gestionnaires et profiteurs, 116; and Crouzet, La grande inflation, 406. By the day of their destruction, the assignat plates had produced 45,581,411,618 francs in assignats. Gignoux, La planche à assignats, 214. On 16 ventôse year IV (6 March 1796), a further 216 million francs in assignats were destroyed in the courtyard of the assignat verifying center, which made a total sum of 1,353,000,000 francs in assignats burned. Le Moniteur 168, 18 ventôse year IV (8 March 1796), 624. 4. Crouzet, La grande inflation, 406. Crouzet attributes to Michel Bruguière the case for the festive connotations of the ceremony. 5. Lefebvre, Thermidoreans, 4. 6. See Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines, 14; and Huet, Mourning Glory, 149–79. 7. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 had effectively eliminated the greatest source of charitable support for the poor. Forrest, French Revolution and the Poor, viii. 8. Woronoff, Thermidorean Regime, 116. For detailed analysis of suicide rates during this period, see Cobb, Death in Paris. 9. As one anonymous author asked in the aftermath of Thermidor, in the text titled Convention, sauve-toi, sauve-nous! , “Why should such beautiful days have been followed by days of mourning, misery and despair!” On the continuation of violence in the Directoire period, see Brown, Ending the French Revolution. 10. Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines, 17. On trompe l’oeil’s relevance to (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, see Court et al., L’effet trompe-l’oeil. 11. Pinel, Traité medico-philosophique, 27–28. 12. Ibid., 28.

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13. Ibid., 110. 14. Engels to Marx, 4 September 1870, quoted in Higonnet, “Terror, Trauma, and the ‘Young Marx’ Explanation,” 129. 15. Higonnet, “Terror, Trauma, and the ‘Young Marx’ Explanation,” 153–54. On the traumatic effects of the early revolutionary years, see also Shapiro, Traumatic Politics. 16. See Miller, “Aftermath of the Assignat,” 70–91. 17. The numbering of the Tableaux remained the same until the 1817 edition, at which point the prints were numbered through with the addition of nine tableaux préliminaires, making this image number 132. 18. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 143. 19. See La Révolution par la gravure, 219. This comprehensive catalogue of the Tableaux historiques and their pirate versions makes no reference to tableau 123, though it is reproduced, nor of Benizy, its artist. 20. Hould, La Révolution par l’écriture, 498–99. 21. Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française, vol. 2, 82–83. Although several prominent authors wrote for the Tableaux, particularly in its early years, the texts were subordinate to the visual aspect of the publication. 22. Jenson, Trauma and Its Representations, 15. 23. Ibid. 24. See Hallett, “Medley Print,” 214–37; and McNeil, “Collage and Social Theories,” 283–98. 25. See Muszynski, Les assignats, 23–37, for reproductions of all signatures (manuscript and printed) to be found on assignats. 26. See Milman et al., Le trompe-l’oeil: Plus vrai que nature? 32–40. 27. Siegfried, “Boilly and the Frame-up of Trompe-l’oeil,” 34. 28. Desbuissons, “A Ruin,” 432–48; and Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines, 130–235. 29. Baudrillard, “Trompe-l’Oeil,” 53. 30. Ibid., 54. 31. Marin, On Representation, 309–10. See also Lichtenstein, Blind Spot, 55–98. 32. LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 716. 33. Sollers, Sade contre l’Être Suprême, 26. I take the phrase “accounting of losses” from Louis-Marie Prudhomme. See Zizek, “‘Plume de Fer,’” 634. 34. Michelet, Le peuple, 65. 35. Appel à l’honneur, 15. 36. Of the figures depicted, only Lafayette survived the Revolution. 37. The self-consciously historical quality of images such as this one is made explicit in a similar circular print from the same period represent-

ing Lafayette, Dumouriez, and Pichegru, each of whose portraits, surrounded by serpents, adorns a volume of revolutionary history. Laurent Guyot, Histoire de la République, trahie en 3 volumes, 1796–99, etching, in BN Estampes N-2 (Lafayette). 38. For similar German prints featuring profiles of prominent revolutionaries, see Freiheit, Gleichheit, Brüderlichkeit, 446–47. For an English variation on the theme, A New Puzzle of Portraits, see Bindman, Shadow of the Guillotine, 156. 39. AN F7 477442. 40. AN AFIV 1470, 18 and 19 March 1793 in Tuetey, Répertoire générale, vol. 9, Convention nationale 2, 106, document 478. See also the report of an attempt to seize a number of transparent fans representing Louis XVI taking leave of his family and other royalist themes, APP AA 132, documents 26 and 27, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de police, Section de la Cité, 28 and 29 fructidor year V. 41. Referenced in Mathiez, Thermidorian Reaction, 224. 42. Mercier, La nouveau Paris, vol. 3, 26. 43. Ibid., vol. 4, 141, vol. 3, 31. 44. Ibid., vol. 4, 141. 45. On revolutionary furniture, see Auslander, “Regeneration Through the Everyday?” 227–47. 46. Burke, Reflections, 189. 47. Depaulis, Les cartes de la Révolution, 7. 48. Mann, Alle Karten auf den Tisch, 116–17. On the jeu de l’oie, see Leith, “Clio and the Goose,” 227–62; Maguet, “Le ciel sur un coup de dès,” 79–87; and Reichardt and Kohle, Visualizing the Revolution, 224–30. 49. Depaulis, Les cartes de la Révolution, 20. 50. Hoffmann, Le monde de la carte à jouer, 34. 51. Manufacturers frequently shared designs for playing cards, as seen in the following advertisement: “On the 1 ventôse new republican cards will be found at the citizen-manufacturers below: Delâtre, Maudron, Ybert, Chassonerie, Minot, Lefer, Minot le jeune, Meunier et Lachapelle, all united for the same design.” Le Moniteur (supplément) 154, 4 ventôse year II (22 February 1794). Jean-Pierre Seguin recounts that the game designed by the Parisian Jean Minot was copied by at least four other presses, while that of Galtot was appropriated by Pinant, by Lamarque, by a card-maker from Toulouse, and, in part, by Jaume and Dugourc. Seguin, Le jeu de carte, 108, and on David, 113. 52. Hoffmann, Le monde de la carte à jouer, 34. In 1813 the law was relaxed to allow the return of kings, queens, and jacks on cards. 53. Depaulis, Tarot, jeu et image, 76. Carey’s set is at BN Estampes, Kh 383 no. 267.

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54. Palloy, Mémoires, BN Mss. nouv. acq. fr. 2811. Quoted in d’Allemagne, Les cartes à jouer, vol. 1, 496. 55. Dunkley, “Les jeux de hasard,” 9–16. 56. M.M******, Dénonciation faite au public, 3. 57. Dusaulx, Rapport et projet de décret, 5. Dusaulx’s L’insurrection parisienne [1790], which reported the events of June to September 1789, was heavily quoted by Chamfort in his narratives for the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. McCallam, Chamfort, 64. 58. Dusaulx, Rapport et projet de décret, 5. 59. Ibid., 5. 60. Goudar, L’histoire des Grecs, 2. 61. See, for instance, the case of the “femme Sainte-Aramanthe,” whose gaming house was an alleged haunt of refractory priests and nobles, and who always appeared to know on which days raids were taking place. AN F7 477512. 62. Freundlich, Le monde du jeu, 80. 63. Ibid., 125. 64. Opinion de Darracq, membre du Conseil des Cinq-Cents, 16–17. Original punctuation. 65. See, for instance, the account of a seizure of a biribi board in a shop in the Passage de Valois in APP AA, Procès-verbaux �������������������������� des commissaires de police, Section de Butte-des-Moulins, 10 May 1791. 66. AN F7 36883 in Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur, vol. 1, 226. 67. BN Mss. nouv. acq. fr. 2670, fol. 98, September 1789; and APP AA, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de police, Section de Butte-desMoulins, 23 mars 1791. 68. Parisian secret agents were spied on in turn by other agents charged with monitoring their progress (Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur, vol. 1, xxi), contradicting François-Noël Babeuf ’s belief that “it is ridiculous and improper to watch oneself.” Journal de la Liberté de la Presse 6, 27 fructidor year II (14 September 1794), 1. 69. Boissy d’Anglas, Motion d’ordre, 1. Boissy’s approach was later outlined in greater detail in Rapport sur la répression des maisons de jeu.

70. On post-Thermidor technologies of mourning, fictional and otherwise, see Schechter, “Gothic Thermidor,” 78–94; and especially Wrigley, Politics of Appearances, 13–58. In a different context, see also Grootenboer, “Treasuring the Gaze,” 496–507. 71. See Greene, “Alexandre Lenoir,” 200–22; and Poulot, “Alexandre Lenoir,” 1515–43. On the relationship of Lenoir’s project to traumatic memory, see Jenson, Trauma and Its Representations, 30–55. 72. See Zizek, “‘Plume de Fer,’” 619–60. 73. Gell, “Vogel’s Net,” 26. 74. Ibid., 27. 75. Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” 576. 76. Derrida, “Paper or myself, you know . . . ,” 2. 77. Watermarks existed in two forms, clair or en opaque, according to whether the design was rendered transparent against an opaque background or vice versa. Watermarking processes changed little under the Revolution, and they were largely made for assignats by two filigranistes, Bouvier and Tugot. See Gaudriault, Filigranes et autres caractéristiques. On the forging of watermarks, see Philipson and Isaac, “Case of Economic Warfare,” 151–63. 78. Johnson, “Versailles, Meet Les Halles,” 112. 79. APP AA 217, document 256, Procès-verbaux des commissaires de police, Section de Pont-Neuf, 25 prairial year VI.

conclusion

1. Etlin, Symbolic Space, 37. 2. Benjamin, “Theses,” 257. 3. See Hunt, “World We Have Gained,” 1–19. 4. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, “Duration proceeds not by continuous growth, smooth unfolding, or accretion, but through division, bifurcation, dissociation—by difference.” Grosz, “Thinking the New,” 28. 5. Palloy, Adresse et projet général, 3.

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INDEX

Page numbers in boldface refer to illustrations. Académie Royale des Sciences, 94 advertisement, 84, 135, 152, 178n76, 182n68, 183n81 allegory of fame, 90, 92, 93, 167 of the Festival of the Federation, 88, 89, 92, 94 of fraud, violence, and cruelty, 135 of justice, 157 of law, 160 of the National Assembly, 119, 132–34 of paper money, 26, 37, 136, 158 of printmaking, 134–41 of revolutionary art, 124, 167 of union, 90, 92, 93 Allegrain, Christophe-Gabriel, 122 almanacs, 119–41 revolutionary, 3, 81, 82, 91, 120, 125–27, 135, 163, 181n31, 181n37, 182n47 traditional, 114, 119, 124–27, 163, 181n31, 181n35 See also calendars; Debucourt, Philibert-Louis; time, revolutionary Ami de la Révolution, 131 Andrieu, Bertrand, 160 Anisson-Duperron, Alexandre-Jacques-Laurent, 64–65, 69 Anisson-Duperron, Étienne-Alexandre, 34, 63, 64, 65, 176n10 anti-monuments, 86 anti-Semitism, 25, 51, 172n38 architecture absence of, 17 and the Bastille (see Bastille; Palloy, Pierre-François) imagined, 103, 119, 138, 167–68, 182n68 other media, relation to, 8, 35–36, 75, 102–3, 105, 117 at revolutionary festivals (see Festival of the Federation [1790, 1791, 1792]; festivals: revolutionary) archives and assignats, 21–26, 64–65 and colonialism, 59–61 documents from, 7, 23, 24, 26, 43–47, 57, 61 and passports, 43–45, 55, 64–65, 69 practices of archiving, 34, 43–45, 46, 50, 64–65, 168, 179n20 of revolutionary history, 7, 44, 46, 64–66, 88, 113, 143 Archives Nationales. See National Archives Aristotle, 136 art, revolutionary antecedents of, 6, 10 circulation of, 3, 6, 17, 34, 80–81, 86, 87, 114, 155 display of, 3, 17, 45, 53, 152–53, 174n37 durability of, 3, 7–8, 10–11, 26–30, 79, 85, 107–12, 167–69 as evidence, 74–75

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foreign artists’ familiarity with, 18, 53, 87, 108, 150, 151, 157, 178n72 nonart images, relation to, 4, 8, 9, 21–26, 30, 43, 53, 57, 61, 154–55 patronage of, 3, 8, 17, 45, 122–23 reception of, 3–4, 8, 45, 80–81, 84, 122, 165, 169, 174n37, 176n27 suspicion of, 4, 17, 33, 35, 52, 71, 78, 109 artisans, 33, 50, 71, 80, 81, 99, 141 artists and builders, 99, 102–3, 112 perceptions of, 33, 35, 99 presence at festivals, 75, 84, 88–94 under surveillance, 30–31, 61, 161 assignats, 15, 16, 21, 65, 164 afterlife of, 10, 111, 143–65 antirevolutionary appropriations of, 18, 18, 20, 20, 21, 21, 172n25 appearance of, 14–16, 19–20, 33–37, 41, 163–64 authentication, of, 16, 18, 31, 33–37 and caricature (see under caricature) circulation of, 4, 13, 17, 20, 24, 33, 34, 37, 38, 65, 143, 147 counterfeiting of (see under counterfeiting) depreciation of, 13, 14, 24, 26, 30, 146–48, 152, 162, 165, 171n7, 172n38 destruction of, 10, 13, 26, 143–65, 183n3 fragility of, 13, 14, 18, 28, 30, 37, 64–65 as images, 1, 9, 13–21, 34–37, 64–66, 69, 71, 160 in images, 10, 13, 17–18, 21–41, 43, 119, 136, 143–65 manufacture of, 3, 14, 17, 23, 28, 33–37, 47, 64–66, 68, 69, 145, 149–50, 155, 160, 172n45 paper used for, 13, 28, 30, 33, 69, 163, 172n44, 172n46 and passports (see under passports, revolutionary) portraits on (see under portraiture) signatures on (see signatures: on money) and visuality, 13, 17, 28, 34, 35–39, 149, 162–65 ateliers de charité, 80, 103 Auber, 57 Austin, J. L., 102 autel de la patrie. See Festival of the Federation (1790): altar at aveu, 43, 50–51, 52 Babeuf, François-Noël, 53, 185n68 Bailleul, Jacques-Charles, 126 Bailly, Jean-Sylvain, 1, 38, 38, 78, 81, 114, 155, 156, 167, 168, 172n30, 177n37 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 93 Bal, Pierre, 16 balloons, hot-air, 80, 94, 158 bals illuminés, 80, 89 Bara, Joseph, 4, 5, 133 Barère, Bertrand, 78 Barnave, Antoine, 22, 23, 172n34 Barthes, Roland, 61, 93–94

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Bastille archives of, 61, 113 cells of, 103, 105, 107, 113, 160 chains of, 1, 112, 128 commemoration of, 1, 71, 74, 97 demolition of, 68, 97, 98, 99, 103, 107, 114, 115, 160 mythology of, 105, 111, 117 outline of, 97, 103, 106, 107, 108, 112 Place de la, 1, 4, 47, 88, 103, 105, 113, 167 prisoners of, 67–69, 105 ruins of, 10, 80–81, 85, 97, 98, 103–5, 107, 115, 128, 167, 182n68 scale of, 97, 98, 99, 107, 112, 114–15 stone, as medium, 1, 99, 100, 103, 108, 110, 111, 112, 115, 124, 128, 159 storming of, 1, 6, 53, 66, 71, 86, 97, 99, 105, 106 vainqueurs of, 46, 66–68, 83, 103, 112, 161, 175n79 See also festivals: revolutionary; Palloy, Pierre-François bas-relief, 76, 81–83, 127, 182n68 Baudelaire, Charles, 7 Baudrillard, Jean, 153–54 beehive, 19 Belley, Jean-Baptiste, 59–63, 60 Bénézech, Pierre, 61, 109, 110 Benizy, J., Valeur des assignats, 143, 144, 148–55, 158, 160, 184n19. See also Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française Benjamin, Walter, 124, 132, 143, 163, 167 Béricourt, Étienne, Divertissement pendant les travaux préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération, 81, 81, 83 Berlin Wall, 105 Berthault, Pierre-Gabriel Fédération générale faite à Paris, 76–78, 77, 93 Statue de Louis XIV abatue, 149, 150 Les troupes du Champ de Mars partant pour la place Louis XV, 76–78, 77 Vue du Champ de Mars le 14 juillet 1790, 71, 73 Besenval, Pierre Victor, Baron de, 76 Beugnet, Jean, Congé absolu, pour passer aux vétérans, 63, 64 bicentennial. See French Revolution billets de confiance, 14–15, 15, 69, 160 biribi, 24, 162, 185n65 blanks on assignats, 16, 19, 69 on certificates, 44, 46, 66, 138 on documents, 44, 55, 119 in narrative, 159 on passports, 44, 51, 58–61, 69, 138 on prints, 55, 121, 134–39, 155 body artist’s, 134, 148–49 boundaries of, 21–32, 37–41, 52, 146

and caricature, 21–32, 37–41, 52–54 degeneration of, 18, 22, 25, 28–30, 37–41, 162 metaphors of, 17, 21–26, 40, 45, 65, 134, 146 movement of, 34, 46, 50, 54, 55, 65, 84–85, 114 national, 18, 19, 37–41, 162 and passports, 43, 46–50, 52–63, 65 politic, 22, 37–41, 45, 52, 71, 119 Boilly, Louis-Léopold, 122, 152, 180n7, 183n81 Boisson, Joseph, 59–61 Boissy d’Anglas, François Antoine, 162 bonnet rouge, 14, 90, 110, 127, 157, 160 Bonneville, François Tableau d’assignats avec portraits de victimes et de profiteurs, 43, 143, 144, 151 Tableau des assignats (avec cartes à jouer et lunettes), 164–65, 164 bons, 14, 20, 20, 165 books, publishing and illustration, 13, 139 borders, decorative on money, 14, 16, 20, 36, 64, 148 on passports, 63, 64 on prints, 139, 157 Bordes, Philippe, 123 Bouchot, Henri, 131 Bourse, caricature of, 22–23, 23 Boyer de Nîmes [Jacques-Marie Boyer-Brun], 23, 172n26, 172n31, 172n38, 173n93 brigandage. See vagabonds Brissot, Jacques-Pierre, 22, 24, 131, 172n32 Brongniart, Alexandre-Théodore, 81, 177n49 bronze, as medium, 1, 78, 110, 111, 121, 127, 136, 179n57, 182n68 Bryson, Norman, 148 bureaucracy, 8, 34, 43, 45, 46, 51, 52, 57–58, 61 Burke, Edmund, 16, 18, 40, 160 cahiers de doléances, 51 Caisse de l’Extraordinaire, 14 Caisse d’Escompte, 14, 111 calendars Gregorian, 16, 63, 123, 126 other prints, use in conjunction with, 3, 10, 121, 134–39, 148, 182n68 religious, 71, 79, 114 Republican, 16, 63, 123–24, 126, 134 revolutionary festival, 71, 114, 129 See also almanacs; Debucourt, Philibert-Louis; time, revolutionary Callot, Jacques, 57, 148 Cambacérès, Jean-Jacques Régis de, 1 Camus, Armand Gaston as archivist, 1, 23–26 in counterrevolutionary print culture, 23–26, 22, 26, 27, 38–41, 38, 172n31

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nose of, 24, 25, 38, 40 and printmaking process, 36, 173n82 in revolutionary print culture, 114 revolutionary politics, role in, 23, 39, 66, 171n14, 172n30 See also caricature; L’homme aux assignats Canetti, Elias, 86 cannibalism, representation of, 25 Capuchins, Convent of the, 35 Carey, Louis, 160, 184n53 caricature and assignats, 9, 17–26, 28–32, 37–41 counterrevolutionary, 17–18, 21–32, 37–41, 46, 149, 173n93 and gambling, 40 market for, 17, 18, 22–23 and portraiture (see under portraiture) revolutionary, 3, 4, 17, 30–32, 39, 84, 131, 173n93, 178n69 carnival, annual, 79, 81, 146, 177n37 carnivalesque, the, 25, 83, 111 Cellerier, Jacques, 74, 76, 79–80, 83, 87, 93, 94, 167, 176n26, 177n41 certificates and assignats, 65, 69 and the Bastille, 4, 66–68, 67, 99, 101, 112 of birth, 46 for festival attendance, 66, 114 of National Guard, 51 passports, compared to, 46, 55, 66 and revolutionary identity, 10, 44, 66, 138 See also congés, military; documents: bureaucratic; passports, revolutionary Chabot, François, 22, 24 Chamfort, Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, 185n57 Champ de Mars bird’s-eye views of, 88–94 construction of, 79–86, 107, 113 massacre on, 128 menagerie at, 79, 177n35 as ritual space, 73–76, 79–80, 88, 107, 110, 113–14, 176n18 as social space, 81 See also Festival of the Federation (1790); festivals: revolutionary; journée des brouettes Charlemagne, 79 Charlet, Nicolas-Toussaint, 122 Charlier, Louis-Joseph, 1 Chaussard, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste, 152 Chénier, André, 46 Chénier, Marie-Joseph, 128 chimneypieces, design of, 182n44 Chouans, 20

Chronique de Paris, 33, 80, 131 chronotopes, 93, 94 church bells, 17, 76 church land, confiscation of, 9, 13, 14, 16, 149 civic meal, 81, 112 Civil Constitution of the Clergy, 20, 23, 39, 172n30, 183n7 Clark, T. J., 28 Clavière, Étienne, 35 Cloquet, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, Vue générale de la Fédération française, 90, 92, 93 clothing military uniform, 59, 133 national identity or status, marker of, 121, 180n2 print, represented in, 23–25, 124, 139 revolutionary material culture, significance in, 3, 4, 7 of vainqueurs, 66, 83 See also bonnet rouge; cross-dressing clubs, political, 44, 46, 99. See also Jacobins cockades, 131 cockerel, 14, 20, 159 coinage, metal, 1, 13, 17, 19, 28, 30, 31, 58, 68, 136, 164 Collot d’Herbois, Jean-Marie, 112, 126, 181n37, 182n52 colporteurs, 50, 61, 126, 182n56, 183n70 confraternity prints, 114, 126 congés, military, 44, 45, 50, 63, 64 Constitution of 1791, 1, 2, 37, 38, 54, 124, 128, 131, 155 Constitution of 1793, 155 construction, trade of, 80, 85, 99, 103 Consulate, 152, 158, 180n2 Copernicus, 141 coptographs, 158 Corday, Charlotte, 28, 55, 57 Council of the Five Hundred, 146, 161 counterfeiting of assignats, 9, 13–14, 20, 28–37, 65–68, 146, 163, 171n14, 175n74, 185n77 of billets de confiance, 14 by British government, 13, 33, 35 and gambling, 161 of passports, 45, 52, 59, 175n74 of playing cards, 160 punishment for, 16, 19, 20, 31, 33, 34, 66–67, 68, 154, 173n51, 173n57 counterrevolution and Festival of the Federation, 79, 175n74, 176n33 and image making, 8, 17–32, 37–41, 46, 108, 131, 149, 155–58 and itinerant individuals, 52 and playing cards, 160 See also caricature Cris de Paris, 26, 131 cross-dressing, 52, 85, 111

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crowds, revolutionary, 149 fear of, 52, 66 at Festival of the Federation, 76, 85, 86, 88, 93, 95 as witness, 1, 141, 145 Cruikshank, Isaac. See Nixon, John Darracq, François-Balthazar, 161 d’Artois, Comte de, 33 dauphin, 20, 20, 53, 103, 156, 157, 179n35 Davallon, Jean, 75 David, Jacques-Louis as archetype for revolutionary art, 4, 103, 171n11 Intervention of the Sabine Women, 152–53 Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort, 55, 56, 100–101, 175n47 Marat assassiné, 26–31, 29, 31, 55 La mort de Joseph Bara, 4, 5, 133 Oath of the Horatii, 123, 128 and playing cards, 4, 160 Portrait of Jeanbon Saint-André, 57–58, 58, 175n50 and production of assignats, 30, 31, 35, 172n49 and revolutionary festivals, 4, 106, 110–11, 179n57 Serment du jeu de paume, 123, 181n16 death in art, 4, 21, 30, 133, 143, 147, 153–58, 162 as motif in the Terror, 8, 100, 162 sentence, 31, 35, 57, 81, 111, 147, 148, 173n57 de Baecque, Antoine, 174n38 Debucourt, Philibert-Louis Almanach national, 119–41, 120, 127, 131, 135, 137; aristocrats in, 121, 128, 134; audience for, 119, 135, 182n56; children in, 121, 124, 128, 133, 182n44; and materiality, 119–22, 127–41; newspaper vendor in, 121, 131–34, 135, 136, 138, 182n56; other almanacs, relation to, 119, 124–27, 131, 135, 141; and revolutionary time, 10, 121, 123–27, 139–41, 143 Baudelaire’s account of, 7 Cadran républicain, 139 Calendrier républicain, 124, 125, 134–35 career of, 119, 121–23, 180n2, 180n7, 180n9, 181n11, 181n13, 181n18, 183n81 La croisée, 132–33, 132 Droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 182n66 La paix. A Bonaparte pacificateur, 139, 140 Préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération, 129, 129 prints attributed to, 31 La promenade publique, 132 Réception du décret du 18 floréal, 183n70 La rose mal défendue, 132 Suzette mal cachée, 122 Traité de paix avec l’Empire, 183n70 Vive le roy, 183n70

Vue de la halle, 122 de Certeau, Michel, 139 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1, 13, 44, 54, 101, 103, 127, 134 De la Marche, Simon François, 35, 173n71 Demachy, Pierre-Antoine, 87 Denkbuch der Franzoesischen Revolution, 149, 151 Deperey, G., 35, 36, 37 Dépots Nationaux Littéraires, 152 Descourtis, Charles-Melchior, 122 Désilles, André, 71 Desmoulins, Camille, 31, 75, 110, 113, 131, 182n56 Devosge, Anatole, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, 55, 56, 100–101, 175n47 d’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron, 136 dialogism, 93, 121, 168 Didot, Pierre-François, 26, 86, 88 Directoire, 146, 147, 148, 161, 180n2, 183n9 disguise anxiety about, 52, 84, 111, 173n57 as National Guard, 51, 85 as priests, 108 as soldiers, 51 See also cross-dressing; dissimulation; masks dissimulation as antirevolutionary characteristic, 24, 28, 31, 33, 40, 52–54, 84 at festivals, 84–85 and images, 10, 52, 78, 95, 109–12, 132–33, 152, 155–58, 159–65 See also cross-dressing; disguise; masks documents bureaucratic, 10, 26, 35, 57–58, 111, 124, 134, 139, 152 identity: absence of indicating criminality, 51, 54, 65; improvised, 21, 160; and national printing workshops, 34, 63; revolutionary print culture, significance in, 3, 7, 43–69, 71, 143 See also certificates; passports, revolutionary Donchery, Antoine, Portrait de Pierre-François Palloy, 97, 98 Doncre, Guillaume-Dominique, 152 d’Orléans, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, 161 Drouais, Jean-Germain, Soldat romain blessé, 133, 133 Drouet, Jean-Baptiste, 31, 32, 53, 175n39 Droz, Jean-Pierre, 172n49 assignat, twenty-five sols, 13, 15, 19–20 Dubin, Nina L., 98, 114 Dubois, Laurent, 59 Dubuisson, Jean. See Benizy, J. Dugourc, Jean-Démosthène, 86–87, 160, 184n51 Dumouriez, Charles-François, 55, 172n30 Duplessi-Bertaux, Jean, 177n44 Honoré, Gabriel, Riquetti, Mirabeau, 57, 57 Dupont de Nemours, Pierre-Samuel, 111, 171n7, 182n56

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Dupré, Augustin, 17 Dusaulx, Jean, 66, 112, 161, 185n57 Dying Gaul, 133 economists, free-trade, 47 écorché, 24 Eiffel Tower, 93–94 Élisabeth, Mme, 156, 157 émigrés, 33–34, 54, 158, 174n38 Encyclopédie (Diderot, d’Alembert, et al.), 40, 50, 111, 136, 177n37 Engels, Friedrich, 147 Enlightenment, the, 105, 167, 168 entries, royal, 73, 79 ephemerality Ancien-Régime, as characteristic of, 3, 7 anxiety about, 13, 28, 79, 85, 107–12, 135 and collecting, 7, 114, 168 and festivals (see Festival of the Federation [1791]; festivals: revolutionary) as modern, 3, 117, 143–45, 168–69 See also art, revolutionary; provisionality Etlin, Richard, 78, 167, 177n49 ex-votos, 7, 113 Fabre d’Églantine, Philippe, 123 faience, 99 family revolutionary, 85, 124 royal, 10, 52, 53, 80, 85, 157–58 famine, 18, 51, 146 fasces, 14, 16, 47, 90, 127, 157 Fenaille, Maurice, 136, 138 fans, 148, 152, 184n40 Fauchet, Abbé Claude François, 38, 38 fédérés, 89, 114, 177n57 Festival of Liberty, 111 Festival of Reason, 133 Festival of Reunion, 74, 110, 111, 176n18 Festival of the Federation (1790), 73, 77, 81, 82, 83, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92 altar at: characteristics of, 80, 85, 93, 107–8, 128, 152; representation of, 76, 78, 83, 86, 88, 90, 106, 108, 129, 157; reuse of, 73, 74, 129 arch at, 76, 78, 80, 81–83, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 94, 152, 167, 176n26 and artifice, 84–86, 95, 108, 112, 152 and the Bastille, 1, 47, 97, 105–12, 128 construction of (see Champ de Mars; journée des brouettes) ephemerality of, 10, 71–79, 81–83, 85–86, 93, 94, 97, 107–8, 110, 129–31 images of: aerial views, 71, 88–94, 106–7; in construction (see Champ de Mars; journée des brouettes); in process, 10, 75, 76–78, 81, 84, 85–86, 86–95, 106–7, 114, 178n69

mythology of, 50–51, 74–78, 81, 85, 90, 182n52 oath at, 71, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 89, 90, 93, 106, 107, 108, 113, 122–23 procession at, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 89, 93, 105, 107, 176n33 and religion, 74, 113–14 spectatorship at, 76, 80, 88, 89, 93–95, 108–10 Festival of the Federation (1791), 71, 72, 73, 108 Festival of the Federation (1792), 73 festivals antique, 79, 86 religious, 7, 79, 84, 111, 123, 161, 177n37 revolutionary: architecture at, 74, 75, 78, 79–80, 90, 97, 108, 129, 152 (see also Festival of the Federation [1790, 1791, 1792]); and artistic practice, 4, 74–75, 88–94, 119, 149; and the Bastille, 66, 105–12; and gambling, 161; historiography of, 71, 74, 75, 76; pedagogical role of, 110, 113; other festivals, distinction from, 7, 73, 146; in provinces, 78, 89; recycling of structures at, 73, 74, 97, 129; and the theater, 73, 85, 95, 109–12, 129; transience of, 3, 71–79 royal, 7, 79, 84, 161 Festival of the Supreme Being, 74, 80, 95, 106, 110, 111, 129, 130 Festival of the Swiss of Châteauvieux, 73, 74, 111 Festival of Victory, 73, 74 fireworks, 76, 79, 89, 179n64 fleur-de-lys, 16, 20, 80, 157, 158, 160 foreigners as consumers of prints, 18, 53, 87, 108, 150, 151, 157, 178n72 influx of, 51, 174n19 repatriation of, 52, 80 representation of, 58–63, 121, 123, 124, 134 formes, 23, 36, 37, 136, 138 Fouquier-Tinville, Antoine Quentin, 55 Franklin, Benjamin, 71 French Revolution bicentennial of, 9, 88–89 completion of, 3, 76, 129–31, 154 historians’ understanding of, 7, 8–9, 74, 143, 167–68 and modernity, 3, 7, 117, 131, 134, 139–41, 167–69 origins of, 6, 7, 115 and repetition, 101, 102, 112, 117, 139–41, 145, 146, 154, 155, 169 women, and representation of, 37–39, 54, 58, 83, 84, 110, 131–34, 139, 177n50, 178n87 Freud, Sigmund, 86, 145, 146 Fritzsche, Peter, 98 furniture, revolutionary, 3, 101, 159–60, 159, 165 Gabriel, Ange-Jacques, 76 gambling, 24, 40, 126, 160–62 games, 4, 24, 40, 103, 115–16, 154, 157, 159–62, 179n35

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Gatteaux, Nicolas-Marie assignat, fifteen sous, 16, 16 assignat, four hundred livres, 64–65, 65 assignat production, role in, 17, 37, 173n49 medal designs, 174n11 playing-card designs, 160 Projet d’un monument pour consacrer la Révolution, 47, 48, 174n8 Gazette française, 157 Gell, Alfred, 163 Gence, Jean-Baptiste-Modeste, 108 Gillot, Claude, 135, 183n69 Gillray, James, 18 Ginguené, Pierre, 61 Girardet, Abraham, 149, 177n49 Giraud, Antoine Cosme, Le XIV juillet MVCCLXXXX, 79, 106, 106 Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Anne-Louis passport issued to, 61–63, 62 Portrait of Citizen Belley, 59–63, 60 Self-portrait, 62, 62 Girondins, 147 globalization, 134, 141 Gois, Étienne-Pierre-Adrien, 172n49 Goncourt, Edmond, 112, 119, 121, 122, 131, 136 Goncourt, Jules de, 112, 119, 121, 122, 131, 136 Gossec, François-Joseph, 128 Goudar, Ange, 40 graffiti, 105 Grands-Augustins, monastery of, 34 Great Fear, the, 52 Greece, 4, 86 Grégoire, Abbé Henri, 54, 175n43 Gresly, Gaspard, 152 Griffiths, Antony, 139 Grigsby, Darcy Grimaldo, 59, 61 Gruber, Alain-Charles, 78 Guadeloupe, 59 guillotine, 51, 154, 173n51 Haitian Revolution, 59 Harbison, Robert, 127 Hébert, Jacques-René, 172n38 Hauer, Jean-Jacques, General Lafayette and Mme. Roland, 71, 72, 94 Henri IV, 16, 18, 167 Hercules, 16 Higonnet, Patrice, 147 Hoche, Louis Lazare, funeral of, 73 L’homme aux assignats, 21–33, 22, 37, 40–41, 46, 172n38. See also Camus, Armand-Gaston; caricature

Hôtel de Soubise, 64 Hôtel Penthièvre, 63 Hôtel Radziwill, 161 hôtels particuliers, 161 Hould, Claudette, 9, 78, 174n38 Huffner, A. W., Verbrennung der Assignaten in Paris am 19ten Febr. 1796, 145, 145, 150 Hugo, Victor, 7 Hunt, Lynn, 8–9, 84, 85, 123, 171n18 iconoclasm, 1, 38, 68, 103, 105, 139, 145, 149. See also assignats; Bastille; Palloy, Pierre-François; sculpture identity, revolutionary, 6, 43–69, 97, 115. See also subjectivity images printed: in artistic hierarchy, 45–46, 63, 89, 122; efflorescence of, 17, 139, 152; historiography of, 4, 8–9, 45; objectivity of, 45–46, 74–75, 85, 88, 95; other media, relation to, 31, 63, 74, 78, 80, 85, 86–87, 93–95, 103, 119–41, 154; printing as metaphor, 78, 102, 105, 112, 117, 128–29, 133–36, 141; production of, 4, 16, 31, 33–37, 63–66, 74–75, 119–23, 126, 127, 134–41,158; publication of, 3, 13, 17, 22, 23, 80–84, 86–90, 114, 119–23, 143, 148–53, 157–61, 171n41; reception of, 4, 22, 53, 74–75, 80–81, 84, 86–89, 95, 119–23, 126, 134–41, 143–45, 149–58, 161–65; self-referentiality of , 84, 89, 95, 138–41, 154; and time, 11, 24, 43, 75, 78, 93–94, 112, 119–141, 143–65; universalizing characteristics of, 46, 54, 88, 139 standardization of, 14–15, 33–37, 50, 65, 88–89, 139, 160 Imprimerie de la République, 64 Imprimerie des Administrations Nationales, 63, 64 Imprimerie du Bulletin des Lois, 63 Imprimerie du Louvre, 63 Imprimerie Impériale, 64 Imprimerie Nationale, 34, 63, 64, 176n10 Imprimerie Royale, 34, 63, 64 Indians, 121, 134 Institut de France, 132, 181n18, 182n59 Jacobins patronage of, 122–23, 126, 181n16, 182n56 politics of, 8, 28, 133, 134, 143, 147, 155 portraits of, 28, 58 and revolutionary festivals, 74, 110, 129 Janinet, Jean-François, 122 Jaucourt, Chevalier Louis de, 40 Jaume, Urbain, 160, 184n51 Jenson, Deborah, 151 jeux de l’oie, 160 Johnson, James H., 164 Jourdan, Annie, 102 Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, 37

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Journal de Paris, 135 Journal du Soir, 131 journée des brouettes class conflict at, 83, 84 events leading to, 79–80 images of, 76, 80–86, 81, 83, 94–95, 107, 129, 129 sexual tension at, 83, 84 See also Champ de Mars; Festival of the Federation (1790) Kant, Immanuel, 152 Kersaint, Armand-Guy, 107, 108 Kohle, Hubertus, 9 Korff, Baron de, 52 Koselleck, Reinhart, 139–41 Kubler, George, 117 labels, commercial, 138–39, 138, 148 LaCapra, Dominick, 154 Lafayette, Marquis de and National Guard, 51, 177n37 and oath of the fatherland, 93 representations of, 71, 72, 88, 89, 94, 114, 108, 155–57, 156, 184nn36–37 Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa, 58, 146, 175n50 Lambert, Maurice, 75, 79 Lameth, Charles Malo François, 22, 24, 114 Landes, Joan, 9, 178n8 Langlois, Claude, 23, 24 language, revolutionary, 36, 54, 93, 111, 112, 146, 157, 175n43 Lanoa, 85–86 lanterns, magic, 158 Lanthenas, François, 37 Latude, Henri Masers de, 68–69, 68, 97 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 59, 61 Lavigne, Jean, 34 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 36 Law, John, 14, 24, 25, 51 laws, printed, 3, 47, 63, 135, 174n38 Le Brun, Charles, 57, 97 Le Chapelier, Isaac René Guy, 22, 24, 40 Lecoeur, Louis La Constitution française, 124, 125 Serment fédératif du 14 juillet 1790, 89, 90 Lecomte, Hippolyte, 122 Lefébure, Louis-Henri, 122 Lefebvre, Georges, 146 Lefebvre, Henri, 128 Legislative Assembly, 1, 33, 54, 63, 128, 179n20, 181n37 Legrand, Augustin, 183n70

Lenoir, Alexandre, 162 Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, Michel, 55, 56, 100. See also David, Jacques-Louis Lesueur, Jean-Baptiste, Modèle de la Bastille, 112, 113 letterheads, 4, 8, 9, 63, 65, 131, 182n59 lettre de cachet, 68, 167 Levachez, Charles-François-Gabriel, Honoré, Gabriel, Riquetti, Mirabeau, 57, 57 levée en masse, 20 Levraud, Benjamin, 40 Lille, 84, 114, 160 Linotte, 37 livre rouge, 128, 167, 182n46 Locke, John, 97 lottery, 63 Louis XIV, 53 Louis XV, 68, 157 Louis XV, Place, 76 Louis XVI execution of, 1, 18, 37, 103, 111 and Festival of the Federation, 78, 84, 113 marriage of, 79, 84 portraits of: in art, 1, 52–54, 103, 128, 136, 157, 159, 184n40; on money, 13, 16, 18, 28, 31, 32, 36–37, 41, 52, 147 speeches by, 128, 134 Lucas, Colin, 66 magic, 28, 61, 105, 113, 117 mandats territoriaux, 14, 23, 64, 147, 148 maps, 88, 90–93, 92 Marat, Jean-Paul, 28, 30, 55, 57, 100, 111, 155–57, 156, 160, 176n33 marble artificial and painted, 76, 121, 127–28, 134–39, 152, 182n68, 183n74, 183n77 as material for sculpture, 71, 78, 94, 110, 133, 182n44 in printmaking trade, 136–37 See also Debucourt, Philibert-Louis; monuments; sculpture Maréchal, Sylvain, 126 Marie-Antoinette, 53, 54, 55, 79, 84, 156, 157 Marin, Louis, 45, 58 Marx, Karl, 24, 132, 147, 167 masks, 26, 40, 52, 53, 84, 109, 161, 162, 165, 177n37, 177n55 matrices, 23, 26, 36 Mauss, Marcel, 117 Maury, Jean-Sifrein, 155 maximum, 147 Mayence, siege of, 18 medals, 1, 66, 101, 103, 105, 114 medley prints, 152, 153

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memory, revolutionary and the Bastille, 97–117 devaluation of by satire, 23, 25 and monuments (see under monuments) and printed images, 6, 10, 78, 93–94, 97–117, 143–65, 167–69 See also archives; monuments; time, revolutionary Menus-Plaisirs, 73 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 13, 14, 40, 68, 158 Michelet, Jules, 85, 95, 155 Military Academy, 76, 79, 80, 87 militias, regional, 71, 79, 106 mime, 85, 106, 110 mimesis, traumatic, 151–52 Minerva, 127–28, 131–32, 136, 182n59 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de, 57, 57, 71, 111, 131, 156, 157, 182n56 Mississippi Bubble. See Law, John Mitchell, W. J. T., 121 modernity. See under French Revolution Moitte, Jean-Guillaume, 76, 152, 172n49, 176n24 Momoro, Antoine-François, 133, 136–38 Monarchy, Constitutional, 157 money, paper. See assignats; billets de confiance Le Moniteur, 50, 57, 88, 113 Montargis, 61, 62 Montesquiou, Anne-Pierre, 37 monuments desire for, 4, 86, 108 durability of, 3, 74, 78, 79–86, 87, 93–95, 105, 107–13, 117, 127–39 imagined, 3, 47–48, 119–141, 167, 182n68 lack of, 17, 78, 129–31 and mourning, 86, 139 Place de la Bastille, proposed for, 1, 6, 103, 107 and revolutionary memory, 1, 3, 51, 71, 74, 78, 86, 107–12, 127–39, 162 See also architecture; Bastille; Debucourt, Philibert-Louis; Festival of the Federation (1790, 1791, 1792); Palloy, Pierre-François; sculpture Mouchy, Louis-Philippe, 181n11, 181n18 mountain, 74, 80, 93, 129 mourning, 86, 146, 157, 159, 183n9 Mr Jean Law (Schenck), 24, 25 mug shots, 53, 55, 58 Mulot, Dom François-Valentin, 22, 24 Musée Carnavalet, 134, 159, 183n81 Musée des Monuments Français, 162 Muszynski, Maurice, 14 Napoleon I, 61, 64, 139, 151, 159 Napoleonic Empire, 61, 64, 100, 122, 151, 158, 180n2 National Archives, 1, 23–24, 25, 26, 46–47, 61, 64

National Constituent Assembly and assignats, 13, 35 and the Bastille, 66, 106 commemoration of, 1, 88 at the Festival of the Federation, 80, 113 gifts to, 106 representation of, 127–28, 131–33, 134 National Convention, 1, 20, 55, 63, 65, 100–101, 110, 157 National Guard, 43, 51, 54, 71, 79, 84, 85, 114 Necker, Jacques, 14, 156, 157 Netscher, Caspar, 121 newspapers, 3, 25, 121, 131–39, 182n54, 182n56 Nixon, John, Le Gourmand, 52–54, 53, 54 Nochlin, Linda, 4, 102 nostalgia, 107, 147, 154 oaths, 51, 114, 123, 131. See also under Festival of the Federation (1790) objects, transitional. See Winnicott, D. W. obsidional notes, 18 obsolescence material, 1, 8, 11, 87, 105, 122, 128, 143, 153–55, 163, 165 political, 1, 4, 128, 165 Ollivier, 99 Ozouf, Mona, 74, 75, 88, 98, 106, 111 painting genre, 121, 122 history, 8, 9, 17, 152 as medium, 30, 87, 110–11, 121–22, 127–28, 134–36, 154 Pajou, Augustin, 172n49 Palais-Royal, 40, 132, 161, 172n38, 177n55 Palloy, Pierre-François Bastille models, 10, 97–117, 100, 104, 105, 113, 116, 129, 167, 178nn12–13 Bastille relics: authenticity of, 102, 105, 115; display of, 68, 106, 111, 112–13, 119; diversity of, 99, 101, 103, 112; gifting and reception of, 112, 113, 117; other relics, relation to, 7, 47, 112–14 commercialism of, 66, 99, 101, 114, 160 Constitution of 1791, damaged by P.-F. Palloy in May 1793, 1, 2 container buried by on Bastille site, 1, 4, 88, 113 furniture made by, 101, 159–60, 159, 165 Medal Made from Bastille Remnants, 103, 105 Modèle de la Bastille, 97–117, 100 reputation of, 99–102, 107, 114, 178n8 and revolutionary festivals, 105–12, 176n10 Stone from the Bastille, with Attached Plan of the Bastille, 103, 104 Trompe-l’Oeil Table with Playing Cards, 159–60, 159, 165 writing by, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 112, 169, 179n20 See also Bastille

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pamphlets, 28, 75, 99, 75, 101, 131–32, 134 panorama, 93–94, 149 Panthéon, 3, 71, 74, 106, 176n24, 177n51 paper, as medium, 22, 24–25, 26, 84, 121, 127, 136, 143, 157, 183n74. See also assignats: paper used for paranoia, 33, 100, 109, 162 Paris circulation of images, as center for, 6, 80, 122, 143, 148, 161–62, 165 guillotine, as site of, 173n51 printing of administrative documents in, 63–64 reconstruction of, 103 as ritual site, 1, 10, 71, 74, 75, 79–80, 99, 107, 111, 133, 145, 176n10 seen from above, 88–94 tourists in, 97–98, 107 Pâris, Philippe Nicolas Marie de, 55, 100, 175n47 passports, revolutionary, 44, 49, 62 and assignats, 34, 43, 50, 52, 54, 63–66, 69 circulation of, 4, 34, 43–51, 54, 55, 65 and criminality, 34, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55–58 descriptions on, 43, 46, 47–50, 53, 54, 55, 61–63, 66, 69, 175n39 design and manufacture of, 47, 61, 63–66, 69 eradication of, 50–51, 54 manuscript on, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 138 and narrative printmaking, 45–46, 53 and portraiture, 43, 46, 50, 52–53, 54–63, 66 and race, 10, 44–45, 55, 58–63 and subjectivity (see subjectivity) temporality of, 44, 46, 69, 143 and visuality, 43, 45, 53, 54 See also certificates; congés, military; documents: identity Passy, 33, 79, 80 Pastoret, Claude-Emmanuel de, 1, 22, 24 Payan, Claude-François, 110 performativity, 10, 102, 117, 123, 154 Perovic, Sanja, 126 Pétion, Jérôme, 51, 111 Petits-Augustins, monastery of, 34, 162 Petits-Pères, monastery of, 34 Peuchet, Jacques, 50 phantasmagoria, 158 photography, 55, 124 physiognomy, 40, 45, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 61, 66, 164 physiognotrace, 157, 158 picturesque, 107 Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste, 181n18 Pillnitz, Declaration of, 128 Pinel, Philippe, 146 Piques, Place des. See Vendôme, Place

Plaine des Sablons, 79 plaster, as medium, 110, 111, 112, 129 playing cards designs for, 4, 157, 159–60, 164, 165, 184n52 manufacture of, 3, 87, 160, 184n51 as money, 14, 160, 165 police, 33, 45, 47, 50, 52, 55, 58, 79, 84, 157, 161–62, 165, 177n37, 185n68 Pompadour, Marquise de, 68 porcelain, 165 portraiture and assignats, 18, 28–31, 36, 54, 128, 148–49, 155–58, 163 and caricature, 18, 24, 28, 30–31, 46, 52–54, 57 and certificates, 55, 66, 68 hidden, 10, 155–58, 163 and passports, 43, 46, 50, 52–53, 54–63, 66 revolutionary visual culture, as component of, 3, 54–55, 148–49, 153 See also Louis XVI posters, 4, 53, 55, 66, 175n39 Potofsky, Allan, 103 Poupart-Beaubourg, Jean-Baptiste, 66–67 priests, refractory, 51, 185n61 Prieur, Jean-Louis Fédération générale faite à Paris, 76–78, 77, 93 Statue de Louis XIV abatue, 149, 150 Les troupes du Champ de Mars partant pour la place Louis XV, 76–78, 77 printers, 36, 43, 50, 64, 81, 84 prison, 34, 58, 66–67, 68, 173n67, 176n20. See also Bastille pro forma, 34, 44–46, 59, 69, 138 propaganda, 8, 17, 18, 66, 71, 84 prostitution, 52, 161 provisionality anxieties about, 71, 97, 129 as artistic strategy, 4, 8, 74, 97, 102, 105, 107, 127, 131, 136, 141, 145, 167–69 political consequences of, 4, 6, 7, 8, 28, 143–45 See also art, revolutionary; ephemerality; subjectivity Prudhomme, Louis-Marie, 84, 162–63, 163, 184n33 Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome, 3, 176n24 race, categorization of, 59–63, 119. See also passports, revolutionary Ramée, Joseph-Jacques, 76 Ramel-Nogaret, Dominique-Vincent, 13, 14 Ramette, Odile, 79, 93 Rancière, Jacques, 97, 132 rebus, 26, 172n40 Reichardt, Rolf, 9, 102 relics, 3, 7, 30, 78, 162 of the Bastille (see Bastille; Palloy, Pierre-François)

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Renouvier, Jules, 71, 74 repas fraternel. See civic meal Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme, 81, 85, 180n86 Reveillière-Lépeaux, Louis-Marie, 110 Réveillon, Jean-Baptiste, 28, 172n46 Révolution, Place de la, 68 Révolution, Pont de la, 103 Revolution of 1830, 1 Révolutions de France et de Brabant, 84, 131, 182n56 Les Révolutions de Paris, 84 rights, human, 44, 59, 61 risk, 10, 40, 160–62 Robert, Hubert La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition, 98, 114, 115 Fête de la Fédération au Champ de Mars, 87, 87 Robespierre, Maximilien, 55, 71, 129, 146, 155–57, 156, 164–65, 179n64 Roland, Jean-Marie, 35, 100 Roland, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, 71, 72, 94 Rome, 4, 61, 79, 83, 86, 122, 168, 176n26 Romme, Charles-Gilbert, 123, 129, 134 Rondanini Faun, 133 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 50, 52, 71, 74, 85, 109, 127, 133, 167 Royal and Catholic Army, 20 ruin, financial. See assignats: depreciation of ruins of the Bastille (see under Bastille) contemporary discourses on, 98, 115 Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de, 154 Saint-Aubin, Augustin de, 36 Saint-Aubin, Camille, 40 Saint-Domingue, 59–61 Sainte-Menehould. See Varennes, flight to Saint-Jacques, rue, 80, 179n49 Saint-Louis, 18, 24 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de, 160 Salon, 122, 133, 152, 153, 178n69, 180n9 sans-culottes, 18 sauf-conduit, 50 scaffolding, 81, 83, 107 Sceaux, 103, 176n10 Schenck, Leonard. See Mr Jean Law (Schenck) Schenck, Pieter, II. See Mr Jean Law (Schenck) Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 107 sculpture and the Bastille, 99, 102, 105, 107–8 destruction of, 68, 107–8, 117, 149 other media, relation to, 8, 71, 75, 102, 110, 119–41, 162

portrait sculpture, 71, 94, 111, 133, 160 at revolutionary festivals, 71–95, 107–12 See also Bastille; iconoclasm; monuments; Palloy, Pierre-François seals, 43, 64, 66, 69, 112, 171n15 Sekula, Allan, 55 senses, hierarchy of, 108–9, 110, 113 Shami, Seteney, 134 Shaw, Matthew, 124, 126 sickness, 18, 37–41 Siegfried, Susan, 152, 180n7, 182n45 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 114 signalement. See passports, revolutionary signatures on money, 14, 16, 43, 69, 152, 184n25 on passports and certificates, 34, 43, 46, 63, 66, 69 Silhouette, Étienne de, 157 silhouettes, 10, 156, 157–58, 158, 163 simulacra, 85, 95, 102, 107, 111–12, 115, 167 slavery, 44, 59, 76 Smith, Philip, 107 Société de la Révolution. See Jacobins Société des Amis de la Constitution. See Jacobins soldiers children as, 116, 121, 124 criminality of, 33, 51 and passports, 43 representation of, 59, 63, 76–77, 88 at revolutionary festivals, 80, 88, 107 songs, revolutionary at revolutionary festivals, 14, 84, 111, 114, 128, 177n50, 177n54 revolutionary visual culture, as component of, 3, 80 Sontag, Susan, 37 souvenirs, 3, 4, 10, 61, 90–93, 95, 114–15. See also Bastille; Palloy, Pierre-François Spang, Rebecca, 31, 143 spectacles, 39, 47, 152, 164–65 speculation, 23, 40, 52, 98, 135, 146, 148, 160, 161, 162, 172n38 stamps on assignats, 16, 17, 19–20, 43, 64, 143, 145, 172n49 on passports, 34, 43, 46, 52, 63, 64, 65 of vainqueurs, 112 See also timbre identique; timbre sec stereotyping, 36–37, 63. See also images: printed; typography Stewart, Susan, 115 subjectivity and Bastille relics, 98, 113, 115–17 and identity documentation, 10, 43–46, 51, 54, 58–63, 69 and provisional images, 4–6, 8, 9, 43, 69, 86, 115–17, 138–41, 143–65

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and responses to the Terror, 146–47, 151–60, 62–65, 143–65 and revolutionary festivals, 71 sublime, 97, 114 surveillance, 33–35, 44, 47, 54, 57, 63, 65, 66, 84, 94, 157, 161–62 eye of, 13, 19, 47, 66, 157, 174n11 Swebach-Desfontaines, Jacques-François-Joseph, 149 Serment fédératif du 14 juillet 1790, 89, 90 tabatière, 148, 155–58, 156, 164 Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française audience of, 149, 152 Fédération générale faite à Paris (Prieur and Berthault), 76–78, 77, 93 Honoré, Gabriel, Riquetti, Mirabeau (Levachez and Bertaux), 57, 57 numbering of, 150, 151, 184n17 objectivity of, 45, 148, 149 portraits in, 55–58, 148, 149, 155 Statue de Louis XIV abatue (Prieur and Berthault), 149, 150 texts for, 150, 162, 184n21, 185n57 Les troupes du Champ de Mars partant pour la place Louis XV (Prieur and Berthault), 76–78, 77 Valeur des assignats (Benizy), 143, 144, 148–55, 158, 160, 184n19 visual characteristics of, 76, 78, 148–51, 184n19 tabula rasa, 97, 139 Tackett, Timothy, 1 Tafereelen van de Staatsomwenteling in Frankrijk, 149, 151 Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 79 Tallien, Jean-Lambert, 117 Tardieu, Alexandre assignat, four hundred livres, 64–65, 65 assignats, as engraver of, 17 Target, Gui-Jean-Baptiste, 38, 38 tarot, revolutionary, 160 Taussig, Michael, 105 telegraph, 43 Tennis Court Oath, 123, 172n30 Terror, the effects of, 143, 146–47, 154–58, 162–65 portraits of prominent figures from, 55–58, 155–58, 156 representation under, 109, 181n35 Revolution, as corruption of, 74, 147 theater designs for, 4, 119 and festivals, 73, 85, 95, 109–12 and Pierre-François Palloy’s work, 113, 117 Theophrastus, 136 Thermidor, 110, 111, 139, 143–65, 183n9 Thévenin, Charles, 87 Third Estate, 134, 167

Thurot, Charles, 100 timbre identique, 16, 35, 163 timbre sec, 16, 19, 35, 37, 163, 164, 172n49 time, revolutionary and durability, 6, 7, 10, 43, 97–98, 107, 114–17, 119–41, 143–65 futurity of, 4, 6, 10, 24, 97, 105, 117, 119–41, 167–69 and history, 3, 6, 10, 46, 65–66, 69, 71, 84, 88, 93–94, 98, 107, 115, 119–21, 145, 154–58, 165, 184n37 as rupture with past, 1, 6, 7, 24, 46, 78, 84, 97, 98, 102, 107, 112, 117, 119–41, 147, 167–69 transformations of, 17, 123–24, 139, 181n27, 185n4 See also ephemerality; French Revolution; memory, revolutionary; provisionality trade cards, 138, 183n81 transparency, 11, 50, 80–86, 94, 107, 110 and L’expirante Targinette, 37 and L’homme aux assignats, 23, 31, 40–41 and Marat assassiné (David), 28 and Portrait of Citizen Belley (Girodet de Roussy-Trioson), 59 trauma, 10, 98, 115, 117, 143–65, 151–57, 165 travestie. See cross-dressing trees, liberty, 93, 160 triangle, 47, 157 trompe l’oeil on architecture, 76, 83, 119, 152 and assignats, 10, 143–65 characteristics of, 148–49, 152–55, 159 political uses of, 152, 158, 159, 164–65 and trauma, 143–65 and vision, 94, 145, 152–54, 157–60, 162–65 tuberculosis, 37 Tuileries, storming of, 46, 63, 66, 179n35 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 14 Turks, 121, 134 typography, 26, 34–37, 43, 63–66, 134, 149. See also images: printed universalism, 44, 46, 54, 59–61, 63, 66, 75, 106, 126, 147, 155 vagabonds, 51, 54 valet, 53, 159, 160 Varennes, flight to, 31, 32, 52–54, 128, 159, 178n17 Vaucaire, Maurice, 123 Vendée, wars of, 20, 33 Vendôme, Place, 13, 34, 35, 145, 149, 150, 153, 165 verifying machines, 36 Vernet, Carle, Formulaire du congé absolu, 44, 45 Versailles, 53, 123 Vestier, Antoine, Portrait de Latude, 68, 68

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Victoires, Place des, 34, 149, 150 Vien, Joseph-Marie, 122 Le Vieux Cordelier, 110 vieux papiers, 43, 44 vignettes, 3, 46, 47, 63, 64, 65, 69, 152, 157 violence, revolutionary, 25, 83, 146–47, 154, 162 Vivé, Pierre, 31 Voltaire, 106, 167, 168, 177n51 vue d’optique, 76

Weil, Alan, 101, 178n8 Wilkie, David, 122 Williams, Helen Maria, 107 Winnicott, D. W., 115 women. See under French Revolution Wordsworth, William, 97, 98, 107 Woronoff, Denis, 146 Wrigley, Richard, 7, 177n51 writing, as medium, 34, 45, 61, 63, 100–101, 119, 121, 127, 136–39, 152

wallpaper, 26, 28 watermarks, 16, 19, 145, 157, 163–64, 185n77 wax, 108, 112 Wébert, Michel, 22, 37, 172n26. See also L’homme aux assignats

Young, Arthur, 51 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 123

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