Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix
Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix
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Overview
Primarily a study of art and politics, Broken Tablets discusses painting, sculpture, prints, and medals (many reproduced here for the first time), as well as contemporary literature, including the poetry of Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Victor Hugo. Ribner assesses the ways in which legislation imagery became an instrument of political propaganda, and he clearly illuminates the cult of the law as it became personalized under Napoleon, monarchist under the Restoration, and defensive under Louis-Phillipe.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520308893 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 30 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
Broken Tablets
The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to DelacroixBy Jonathan Ribner
University of California Press
Copyright © 1993 Jonathan RibnerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-07749-0
Introduction
More than two decades before the drafting of France's first constitution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of the difficulty of creating durable laws. The founders of nations, he argued, imputed durability to their laws by claiming a divine source for them. But only an individual of extraordinary genius-a Moses, for example-can produce laws that lend credence to this mythic pedigree: "The great soul of the legislator is the true miracle that substantiates his mission." Rousseau's thoughts resonate like prophecy in light of the rapid collapse of France's early constitutions and the regimes that produced them. His lofty association of law with religion, moreover, foreshadows the veneration of the law during the Revolution. When the nation was invested with legislative power, the law-that ancient social concept and fundamental instrument of power-was perceived in a thrillingly unfamiliar light. It became the focus of a veritable cult, given characteristic expression in 1791 by Gilbert Romme (1750-1795), the patriotic founder of the Tennis Court Society (originally called the Society of Friends of the Law), who declared, "Law is the religion of the state, which must also have its ministers, its apostles, its altars, and its schools." Two centuries later, such passionate devotion to the law seems as remote as the joy that accompanied the destruction of the Bastille. But from 1789 to 1848-a period that saw the introduction of constitutional, parliamentary government and the adoption of the Code Napoléon-law and lawgiving were imbued with evocative power, expressed in art and poetry as well as in political discourse.This book examines the representation of law and the legislator during the troubled beginnings of constitutional government in France. I argue that each of France's early constitutional regimes had recourse to imagery suggesting the divine origin or sacred character of its laws; this imagery changed to reflect the way these regimes sought to establish their legitimacy; and the legitimating discourse itself was subject to subversion and co-option by opponents of these regimes. I hope to shed light on a quest for authority and legitimacy that reached from the public realm of constitutional law, national politics, and propaganda to the private world of the self-aggrandizing artist and poet.
Between 1789 and 1848 in France the cult of the law flowered and then withered. Two famous images of the French legislature bracket the period. In the Salon of 1791 Jacques-Louis David exhibited a drawing, The Tennis Court Oath, charged with heady optimism (Plate 1); in this work he anticipated a painting that was intended to fittingly commemorate the pledge of the self-proclaimed National Assembly-France's first national legislature-to remain united until it had firmly established a constitution. In David's reconstruction of this event of June 20, 1789, a seething multitude is ordered by a centripetal force that at once mirrors the new spirit of national solidarity and recalls the Assembly's insistence on the unity and permanence of the nation's legislative power. The participants are portrayed with all the flattering resources of the French academic tradition that David had done so much to reinvigorate during the previous decade. Heroically framed legislators take their oath with gestures and expressions as incisive as David's contour; it is as if they had been physically remade in accord with their mission of national regeneration. Mirabeau's face, so famously pockmarked, shines without a blemish. The physical bearing of the diminutive Robespierre is as impressive as his patriotic fervor. David's rigorously abstract composition is animated by the feelings attributed to Gilbert Romme and his Tennis Court Society when, on the first anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath, they reenacted the constitutional pledge: "A religious convulsion took hold of their souls; they let out shouts of joy toward heaven, in gratitude for liberty." David's drawing, in a similar spirit of piety, represents the Assembly, headed by three clerics-Abbé Grégoire, Dom Gerle, and the Protestant minister Rabaut Saint-Etienne-taking its vow amid providentially engineered wind and lightning.
Forty-three troubled years separate David's drawing from Daumier's Legislative Belly (Fig. 1), whose title plays on the French term for legislature, corps législatif.
Daumier portrayed the ministers and deputies who were the bulwark of the July Monarchy-a regime created in the name of constitutional integrity-as round-shouldered bureaucrats sitting smugly like so many chairs in the Louis-Philippe style. Whereas David generated a sense of exhilaration through upraised arms, steeply converging walls, and umbrella-bending wind, Daumier emphasized the ponderous bulk of the chamber through the protruding bellies that rhyme so ungracefully with the curves of the newly renovated assembly hall. The Legislative Belly suggests why one of the outstanding legislators of the July Monarchy, the poet Lamartine, complained to his colleagues of the Palais-Bourbon that "France is a nation which is bored." The making and abandonment of nine constitutions in France between the Revolution of 1789 and that of 1848 explains how constitutional government could inspire such extremes of enthusiasm and disgust. The legislative proliferation and waste are all the more striking in contrast with the American Constitution, which, though amended and subject to radical differences in interpretation, has remained intact. The turbulence of French constitutional history can be associated with both ongoing political instability and the continued production of a potent political symbolism that legitimated the present and negated the immediate past. This impulse to wipe the slate clean and start anew was part of the revolutionary heritage. The symbolic aspect of French constitutional law, moreover, accounts for its interest as the subject of art.
The divinely inspired legislator played a large role in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French culture. That the Spartan Lycurgus enjoyed the blessings of Apollo and that Numa, the legendary second king of Rome, gained legislative wisdom from conversing with the nymph Egeria was known from Plutarch's Parallel Lives-a work firmly integrated into the French tradition by Jacques Amyot's classic translation (1559). Any French reader would have known Fénélon's Aventures de Télémaque (1699), which recounts with great sentimental force how Ulysses' son painfully learned virtue and legislative wisdom from Minerva. And of course there was Moses.
Imagery of Moses and the Ten Commandments is my concern in this study. The association of these motifs with the law and with authority was as sacred and fundamental as the Catholic catechism from which French children memorized the Ten Commandments. An attraction to the authority of Moses, furthermore, was deeply embedded in French Romanticism. Since the display of distinguished French religious art of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in The Age of Revolution exhibition (Detroit Institute of Arts, 1975), the post-revolutionary revival of scriptural subject matter has received considerable attention. The new range of significance carried by Old Testament imagery in this period, however, has gone relatively unnoticed. Although many of the images in this book refer to Moses and the divine law of the Ten Commandments, the imagery itself is transvalued under the pressure of new secular concerns.
The theme of divine legislation crossed political boundaries. Moses and the Ten Commandments and the legendary lawgivers Numa and Lycurgus were invoked by revolutionary republicans, Napoleonic authoritarians, Restoration ultra-royalists, and Orleanist constitutional monarchists. Much of the political sentiment with which I am concerned is resolutely authoritarian; some of it is anti-democratic and reactionary. In considering such unsympathetic currents of opinion, my book has been preceded by The Dreyfus Affair exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, and by the work of Zeev Sternhell and Michel Winock. Each of these precedents, concerned with anti-Semitism, nationalism, and anti-parliamentarianism in France during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offers instructive examples of how the most unpleasant ideologies can be approached without sentiment or oversimplification.
My own approach is both thematic and interdisciplinary. Although the visual evidence provided by painting, sculpture, prints, and medals has determined the shape and focus of my book, the imagery employed by contemporary politicians and poets is also integral to the argument, thus allowing access to some unfamiliar affinities between the art objects and their context. I consider some works-the bronze doors of the Madeleine, Préault's Tuerie, and Delacroix's paintings in the Palais-Bourbon library, for example-that are both thematically important and valuable as works of art; major literary works like Alfred de Vigny's "Moïse" and Lamartine's Jocelyn are similarly crucial to my discussion. My interest in other works-schematically propagandistic prints and medals produced under the Revolution and Empire, for example-is primarily iconographic. These works nevertheless bring both theme and historical context into better focus. Given the abstract nature of law, much of the imagery in question is allegorical. Accordingly, this study examines allegory itself during the period when the Davidian tradition matured and was transformed.
Although this is a thematic study, it is organized with respect for the political chronology of France between the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. In the final pages I consider the continued erosion of the French cult of the law during the second half of the nineteenth century. It seems appropriate to end a story of conflict between lofty ideals and brute reality on an elegiac note. (Continues...)
Excerpted from Broken Tablets by Jonathan Ribner Copyright © 1993 by Jonathan Ribner. Excerpted by permission.
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