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Representations 2 (Spring 1983)
. . .
The
initial debate about the abolition of royalty barely revealed a tension that
was to grow in the months and years that followed. Once royalty and its symbols
had been abolished, what was to take their place? Should a sign or insignia be
necessary to republican government? In a report given to the Council of Five
Hundred more than three years after the initial discussion on seals, the same
deputy Grégoire referred to a “strange question” that had been posed: “Is it
necessary that there be a seal of the Republic? In the beginning, seals, they
tell us, were only employed to compensate for the ignorance or the imperfection
of writing.” Grégoire says no more about this position since he is most
concerned to refute it, but the timing of his speech (January, 1796) indicates
that this minority view was most influential during the preceding radical
period of the Revolution, the period known as the Terror (summer 1793–summer
1794). There was at least one writer who explicitly denounced the
personification of moral principles during the Terror: “The metaphysical
principles of Locke and Condillac should become popular, and the people should
be accustomed to see in a statue only stone and in an image only canvas and
colors.” Reason and nature, the foundations of the new regime, needed no
representation outside of clear writing and clear speech since they were
engraved on the hearts of all men. A people with access to print and public
discussion needed no icons.
This extreme
rationalist position was in fact rarely taken, and Grégoire’s answer of 1796
was much more common. He argued that all civilized people found that “a sign, a
type, was necessary to give a character of authenticity” to all public acts.
Moreover, he continued, the use of a seal of state was founded on reason, for a
seal was more easily recognized than a signature, more permanent, and more
difficult to counterfeit. The seal, in other words, made authority public
rather than individual; it represented something much more general than a man’s
signature ever could. True, Grégoire admitted, “the ridiculous hieroglyphs of
heraldry are now for us only historical curiosities.” The seal of a republic
could not be superstitious and obscure like the insignia of aristocracy and
royalty. But this did not mean that symbols could be thrown out completely.
When
one reconstructs a government anew, it is necessary to republicanize
everything. The legislator who ignores the importance of signs will fail at his
mission; he should not let escape any occasion for grabbing hold of the senses,
for awakening republican ideas. Soon the soul is penetrated by the objects
reproduced constantly in front of its eyes; and this combination, this
collection of principles, of facts, of emblems which retraces without cease for
the citizen his rights and his duties, this collection forms, in a manner of
speaking, the republican mold which gives him a national character and the
demeanor of a free man.
Grégoire offered here his own
interpretation of Condillac’s psychology; for him, the sign and symbol, when
correctly chosen, could serve the purpose of political propaganda by “grabbing
hold of the senses” and penetrating the soul. The seal, then, was not only a
representation of public authority but also an instrument of education, an
element in “the republican mold.”
Yet even Grégoire’s
spirited defense of a seal was not without its uncertainties. Although most
deputies could agree that some kind of symbol was necessary, and not
incompatible with democracy, they were not quick to agree on what it should be.
Grégoire gave his long report in 1796 because no definitive seal had ever been
voted. The decision in September 1792 had been almost haphazard, and the seal
proposed was designed initially for the Convention’s archives. In 1796, at the
time of Grégoire’s speech, the seal was still in limbo. Despite Grégoire’s
efforts, it remained so until the advent of Napoleon.
Yet, if there was
no permanent seal of the republic, this was not for want of trying. The seal
became an issue whenever the deputies saw themselves turning in some new
direction. Debate was most intense at three distinct moments of the Revolution:
when the republic was first established in September 1792, during the Terror
(the rule of the radicals), and just after the inauguration of a new, more
moderate legislative system in late 1795 and early 1796. The debates on seals
can be read in two ways: as a record of political conflict over the meaning of
the republic and as an especially dramatic arena for working out the role of
representation more generally. These two aspects cannot be neatly separated,
just as political authority cannot be separated from its cultural frame.
Representation, whether political or cultural, whether a question of deputies
and policies or signs and symbols, was always, at least implicitly, a political
issue. What follows here, then, is an account of how these two aspects of the
crisis of representation were intertwined.
. . .
After
generations of controversy over the republic and as a consequence over its
emblem, Marianne, the feminine civic allegory, was not only accepted but widely
diffused in France. But during the Revolution her future was
by no means guaranteed. The first threat to Marianne came from within the ranks
of republicans, who in 1793 and 1794 sought a less moderate image for their
increasingly radical republic. In October 1793, after the arrest of the
Girondin deputies (who opposed the growing power of the Paris districts and
their radical Jacobin leaders) and in the midst of desperate efforts to recast
the Republic in a more radical mold, the Convention decreed that the seal and
the coins of the Republic should henceforth carry the ark of the constitution
and the fasces as their emblem. The seal’s new legend, “Le peuple seul est
souverain,” underscored the new reliance on popular support. Within a month,
however, the Convention changed its mind again. In early November 1793, the
artist-deputy David proposed that the Convention order the erection of a
colossal statue to represent the French people. Ten days later the Convention
voted to make the statue the subject of the seal of state. Thus, the deputies
had chosen a giant Hercules as the emblem of the radical Republic.
Although, to my
knowledge, no official seal bearing Hercules was ever cast, the intention of
the Convention was reaffirmed on at least two other occasions: in February 1794
and again in April 1794. Moreover, the Musée Carnavalet in Paris has
several sketches by the official engraver Dupré which match the guidelines laid
down by the Convention for the new seal (figure 2). That David had Hercules in
mind as the model for the statue-seal is made clear both by the iconography of
Dupré’s sketch—the figure holds the distinctive club and his lion skin lies
just beside him—and by David’s original text: “Que cette image du peuple debout
tienne dans son autre main cette massue terrible dont les anciens armaient leur
Hercule!” A giant, mythic, male figure now dwarfed Marianne.
. . .
When David proposed
the erection of the colossal statue three months after the festival, the
political circumstances were different. The federalist crisis had passed, but
new issues had arisen to take its place. At the beginning of September, the
Convention, surrounded by angry and hungry sans-culottes, had officially
agreed to make terror “the order of the day.” A general maximum on prices was
declared, and executions by the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris
accelerated. On October 16 the queen was guillotined. Then in November, the
most divisive issue of all gathered steam: de-Christianization. During the same
session at which David first made his proposal (November 7, 1793),
several priests and bishops among the deputies publically abjured their
clerical offices; the most noteworthy hesitator was Grégoire. Three days after
David’s proposal and just a week before the Convention decided to make the
colossus the subject of the seal, the notorious Festival of Reason was held in
Nôtre-Dame Cathedral, now dubbed the Temple of Reason.
Hercules faced a
set of tasks worthy of his name. The most radical deputies and their followers
wanted nothing less than a new cultural frame that would repudiate all
Christian antecedents. Robespierre, David, and the other Jacobin leaders had to
at once respond to this demand (and the demands for a Terror) and try to get
firmer control of a movement which threatened to repulse the large part of a
population that was still fervently Catholic and wary of the new order. Thus,
from the beginning, David’s Hercules had to represent radical aspirations while
at the same time curbing them.
David’s political
intentions were evident in the formal speech he gave on November 17, 1793, the
day the Convention voted to adopt his statue as the prototype of the seal. The
statue was to be a monument to the “glory of the French people,” and a
remembrance of the people’s triumph over despotism and superstition. The
“double tyranny of kings and priests” would be overcome symbolically in the
construction of the statue’s base, which would be made up of the debris from
the statues of kings knocked off the porticos of Nôtre-Dame. Thus would the
Convention, with its “énergie libératrice,” free the present, the future, and
even the past from the “shame of a long servitude.” The statue would represent
the power of the people in the most literal possible fashion; at forty-six feet
in height, Hercules would overshadow memories of even the most popular kings,
such as Henry IV, whose merely life-size image he would replace on the
Pont-Neuf. But behind the statue, motivating it, were David and the Convention.
The choice of the
giant Hercules at once embodied and strained to transcend the ambiguities in
the radical view of representation. David explicitly emphasized the opposition
between people and monarchy; Hercules was chosen, after all, to make this
opposition more evident. But David’s speech, and the image itself, implicitly
referred as well to the uneasy tension between the people and the Convention,
the new sovereign and its representatives. When they chose Hercules for the
seal of the Republic, the radicals committed themselves to the view that some
sort of representation was necessary. In Hercules they sought the most “transparent”
representation possible, a kind of diminishing point of representation. They
wanted an image that would convey the sovereign majesty of the people united,
and the statue contained no obvious reference to the deputies or to the
Convention. Yet even this pared-down representation was constantly subverted by
its nature as an image. It was an image-representation of the people provided
by the people’s representatives, and as such it inherently included the
representatives’ interpretation of the people. This implicit interpretive
element threatened to re-establish in cultural form the very relationship of
political authority (authority outside the people) that the radicals were
promising to abolish. Thus, even as the image proclaimed the supremacy of the
people, it re-introduced the superiority of the people’s representatives.
When speaking to
the Convention, David sought to underline the simplicity of his conception.
“Your Committee [of Public Instruction, for which David spoke] believed that,
in the proposed monument, everything, both the materials and the forms, ought
to express in a sensitive and forceful manner the great memories of our
revolution.” The statue itself would be made out of bronze furnished by the
victories of the French armies. And, “since it is a kind of national
representation, it could not be too beautiful.” The enormous size of the figure
would impose a “character of force and simplicity,” the virtues of the people.
In one of his monumental hands, the colossus (now no longer referred to
explicitly as Hercules by David) would hold little figures of both Equality and
Liberty, pressed close together, which showed, as David claimed, that they
depended entirely on the genius and virtue of the people.
In the present of
1793–94, the giant male figure had potent resonances. The distant, feminine
stature of Liberty represented a moderate republic now
repudiated. The new radical republic had no need of the “hommes petits et
vains” whom Robespierre denounced as the natural enemies of the Revolution;
the Revolution had brought forth a new, heroic man of mythic proportions:
The
French people seem to have advanced two thousand years beyond the rest of
humankind; one would be tempted even to regard it, from within its midst, as a
different species. Europe kneels before the shadows of the tyrants we are
punishing . . . Europe cannot conceive that one could live without kings,
without nobles; and we, that one could live with them. Europe spills
its blood to rivet the chains of humanity; and we spill ours to break them.
Who else but a colossus could
break those chains of humanity?
The Herculean
metaphor had appeared in radical discourse before David ever thought of using
the image in his festival of August 10th. At the end of June, 1793, Fouché
described the victory of the people of Paris over
the Girondins in this fashion:
. . .
the excess of oppression broke through the restraints on the people’s
indignation; a terrible cry made itself heard in the midst of this great city;
the tocsin and the cannon of alarm awakened their patriotism, announcing that
liberty was in danger, that there wasn’t a moment to spare; suddenly the
forty-eight sections armed themselves and were transformed into an army. This
formidable colossus is standing, he marches, he advances, he moves like
Hercules, traversing the Republic to exterminate this ferocious crusade that
swore death to the people.
Fouché’s remarkable statement
reveals the compelling force of the Hercules image for the radicals in Paris; this
figure was nothing like a Marianne. As Fouché slips back and forth between the
people and the colossus, between the past and the present tense, between “them”
and “him,” we can almost see the startling transformation taking place, as a
kind of “terrible” (that is, awe-inspiring and “sublime”) monster rises from
the depths of the city and its people to wreak its vengeance on the people’s
enemies. Where is the sacred center now? With democracy it has become a new
field of forces: “the people” is everywhere, but when it is assembled, when it
comes together in a critical mass, it is transformed into a powerful new
energy. “The Terror” was a radical, emergency form of government established to
confront a series of life-threatening crises, but we can see in this passage
how it was also a very real and disturbing experience for the men who
supposedly invented it. The Terror was the people on the march, the
exterminating Hercules. Hercules, the people, in the eyes of the radicals who
had called it into being, was potentially a Frankenstein’s creation.
The development of
the terrifying monster association only occurred during the Terror, when the
power of the people assembled became more awesome. The Hercules image had
before then a long iconographic history which gave the figure a different
meaning for educated, bourgeois radicals than it could possibly have had for
the popular classes. Hercules was not a “popular” figure; he did not appear,
for instance, in the repertory of popular woodcuts or “imagerie populaire”
which were widely circulated in the kingdom under the Old Regime. Instead,
Hercules appeared most commonly as the mythological representation of French
kings, the Gallic Hercules or Hercule gaulois. This figuration dates
from the French Renaissance. In 1549, for example, the triumphal arch designed
for Henry II’s entry into Paris was capped by a Gallic Hercules representing
Henry’s predecessor Francis I. Like many Renaissance versions of Hercules, this
one had chains extending from his mouth to his companions’ ears, for it was supposedly
characteristic of Hercules that he lead by persuasion rather than by force.
By the time of the
French Revolution, Hercules had gone through something of an iconographic
metamorphosis. Louis XVI, last of the Bourbons, was evidently never associated
with Hercules. Instead, the figure had migrated to America.
Sometime after 1776, our same engraver Dupré struck a medal for Benjamin
Franklin which had the head of a young girl with the device, Libertas
Americana, on the front, and on the reverse had a young child strangling
two serpents. This infant Hercules was being attacked by a leopard, which a
goddess holding a shield with a border of fleur-de-lys was about to strike with
her lance. Here royal France was protecting the new
republican Hercules in America. When a committee was set up
on July
4, 1776
to prepare a device for a seal of the United States of America, one
of its members, John Adams, proposed Gribelin’s engraving of “The Judgment of
Hercules” which served as the frontispiece to Shaftesbury’s widely read tract
on the need for clarity in art (1723). Even in America, the
choice of seal was not effortless. The final decision was not made until 1782,
after six years of deliberation and false starts. Then the choice of an
imperial eagle was, as one art historian claims, “obscure, ‘aenigmatical’ [in
Shaftesbury’s sense], and far beyond the comprehension of all but the middle-
and upper-class gentlemen who had invented [it].” The eagle was the emblem of
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and it had been taken from a German book of
emblems and devices.
Hercules appeared
on a few prints and engravings in revolutionary France before 1793, but David
(perhaps on the urging of Dupré) was almost single-handedly responsible for
reviving and transforming him into a powerful new symbol in the revolutionary
repertory. Hercules had long since lost his association with rhetoric and
persuasion; in the major dictionary of iconology printed in the first years of
the Revolution, Hercules appeared only under the entries “Courage” and “Force.”
The remarks on “Force” indicate, moreover, how allegories had been feminized:
“The iconologists represent Force with the figure of a woman covered by a
lionskin and armed with the club of Hercules.”
. . .
The
radicals of the First Republic did
not fail because their attitude towards the people was full of tension and
contradiction; they failed because the forces arrayed against them and their
allies, the sans-culottes, were more powerful. The radicals of the First Republic,
however ambivalently and didactically, opened up new fissures in the social and
political terrain. In their “crisis of representation” they called upon the
people to look at themselves, to recognize themselves as actors, to make their
“terrible cry” heard in the halls of the Convention as well as in the streets
of Paris. The
power as well as the tension in the radical representation of the people can be
seen in Robespierre’s momentous speech, “The Moral and Political Principles of
Domestic Policy,” given in February, 1794:
But
when, by prodigious efforts of courage and reason, a people breaks the chains
of despotism to make them into trophies of liberty; when by the force of its
moral temperament it comes, as it were, out of the arms of death, to recapture
all the vigor of youth; when by turns it is sensitive and proud, intrepid and
docile, and can be stopped neither by impregnable ramparts nor by the
innumerable armies of the tyrants armed against it, but stops of itself upon
confronting the law’s image; then if it does not climb rapidly to the summit of
its destinies, this can only be the fault of those who govern it.
Ultimate responsibility had to
lie with the people’s representatives, for only they could interpret the
meaning of the “law’s image.” The people, being a diffuse mass by nature, could
not be a fixed sacred center. As a consequence, the representers of the people
hoped instead to fix that center in the law, which they would then in turn
interpret and represent to the people. But the force behind that law and the
source of French cultural rejuvenation was still the people itself.
The depth of the
fissures opened up by such appeals to the people can be measured by the frenzy
of subsequent attempts to close them up again and pretend they never existed.
After 1794 all calls to the people were squashed immediately. The monumental
Hercules disappeared from sight, and most representations of the Republic were
life-size, abstract, arcanely allegorical, and often cluttered with a profusion
of enigmatic symbols. Hercules had required a few words of identification, but
the abstract allegories of the bourgeois republic came with whole pages of
explication, designed for those who could read complex prose.
In 1800, a
rehabilitated David oversaw the replacement of the plaster statue of Liberty. Her
place on the “square of the Revolution” was taken by a national column sitting
on a renamed “square of Concord”
(place de la Concorde). The architect Moreau projected a sixty-seven-foot
column capped by a figure of Liberty, who as one observer
reported, had “a sad and sullen attitude.” Liberty was
now a truly distant figure, elevated far above the heads of the people. Within
a few months, even this remote Liberty was torn down in favor
of Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe. The imperial state based on military victory had
triumphed over the Republic. But perhaps the most fitting end to our story is
the Eiffel Tower, the
asexual colossus of the new industrial age, which required no words at all, and
made no political appeal to the people. The machine was now the agent of their
destiny, and the shaping force of social relations. The mute, mammoth
representation of the machine age overshadowed the radical Hercules and all his
proletarian successors. Most amazingly, this monument was the Third Republic’s way
of celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution.
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