Cameron: Reflections on Violence and the Crowd in the Images of the French Revolution


Image 28. La Bastille dans les prémiers jours de sa demolition [The Bastille Early in Its Demolition]

Scarcely two months after the assault on the Bastille on July 14, 1789, Hubert Robert exhibited at the Salon a small painting entitled La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition (Paris, Musée Carnavalet)[Image 28], signed and dated July 20, 1789.11 As in the print Demolition of the Bastille [Image 3],12 Robert chose an early stage of the events following the momentous day of July 14^th. Atop the walls of the prison, a group of people (numbering at least fifty) smash the crenellations and topple the loosened stones into the moat below.13 Dramatically composed, Robert’s painting shows the northwest tower slightly left of center with the Bastille’s short, northern side in shadow on the left and its long side, half-illuminated by the sun, spreading towards the right, where smoke billows back and frames the Bastille. In the foreground, a scattering of observers, set off against the white dust rising from the broken stones, view the on-going demolition, with the falling white blocks of stones vividly contrasting with the aged brown walls of the fortress.14

The painting’s presence at the Salon was scarcely recorded even though one critic observed that the Salon opened “amongst the tumult of arms, in the middle of the most astonishing revolution” [“parmi le tumulte des armes, au milieu de la révolution la plus étonnante”].15 The few critical responses to Robert’s painting that exist range from admiration to rejection. One writer mentioned that Robert’s buildings “offers one very faithful image” [“offrent une si fidelle image”],16 while another critic felt that “he ought to have taken a harsher stance in his view of the Bastille” [“il auroit du prendre un parti plus sèvere pour sa vue de la Bastille”]. In fact, “he could have frightened instead of making an agreeable painting” [“il pouvoit effrayer, au lieu d’en faire un tableau agréable”].17 The “agreeable” denotes Robert’s style, which was distinguished by “sharp and truthful effects, picturesque sites and a facile touch” [“les effets piquans et vrais, les sites pittoresques, et la touche facile”].18 The first author praised the truth of the work, and presumably appreciated the “agreeable” part of the painting while the other wanted a more political painting that would convey the horror of the prison. What was unremarked was the artist’s use of an exaggerated Piranesian scale to suggest the sublime and, accordingly, the terrible.19 As Burke had stated in his treatise on the sublime, “Greatness of dimension is a powerful cause of the sublime.... ...an(sic) hundred yards of even ground will never work such an effect as a tower an(sic) hundred yards high....”20


	Image 3. Démolition du Château de la Bastille. [Demolition of the Bastille]

Robert’s painting representing the destruction of the Bastille was presumably first sketched on the spot.21 Given its swift execution, what is depicted could be read as a continuing symbol of violence, a reminder of that day in July when the Bastille was “taken” (prise, part of the title of any number of prints), alluded to here by the smoke and fire reminiscent of the burning carts of hay which the crowd had set on fire on the 14^th. Indeed, some might have regarded the figures atop the parapets as participants remaining from the charge on the Bastille of July 14^th, that is, as some of the original violators of persons and property. Others might have been reminded of the visits of representatives of the National Assembly as well as those of various citizens/tourists atop the walls of the Bastille who wanted to share in the destruction of this site of “despotism” as well as the fight for freedom.22 While the painting does not record violence against people, as do the many scenes of July 14^th itself, it does document the attack on property and the continuing assault on royal authority embodied, so to speak, by the fortress itself. Criticized as too agreeable and hence too ambiguous, the painting, like the print Demolition du Château de la Bastille [Image 3], nevertheless, operates visually within the realm of symbolic violence.23

Notes

11 Robert’s painting, The Bastille in the first days of its demolition, is selected both because of its early date and because we have some written reactions to the work. For a more extensive commentary, see Philippe Bordes, “L’Art et le Politique,” in Philippe Bordes et Régis Michel, eds., Aux Armes & aux arts! Les Arts de la Révolution 1789-1799, Paris: Adam Biro, 1988, pp. 107-108, ill. 86. See also Vovelle, La Révolution française. Images et récit 1789-1799, vol. I, pp. 172-173. The work appeared in the Salon livret (that is, the official catalogue) under number 36: “Deux Esquisses faites d’après nature; l’une est une vue prise sur la rivière, sous l’une des arches du Pont Royal, dans le tems de la grande gelée de l’hiver dernier; & l’autre, représent la Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition” [“Two sketches made after nature; one is a view taken on the river, under one of the arches of the Pont Royal, during the time of the great freeze during last winter; and the other represents the Bastille during the first days of its demolition”]. Implicit in this pairing is the idea of cause and effect: the hard winter creating a shortage of grain and high prices of bread that would lead ultimately to the storming of the Bastille. William Olander, “Pour Transmettre à la postérité: French Painting and Revolution, 1774-1795,” Unpublished Dissertation, New York University, 1983, pp. 112-114, 116-7 mentions the work’s early date and states that the painting was presented to Lafayette.

12 Sous les pavés, la Bastille. Archéologies d’un mythe révolutionnaire, Paris: Caisse Nationale des Monuments historiques et des sites, 1989, p. 128 shows a drawing by Louis Moreau taken at a similar moment as that made by the printmaker of Image 3. The demolition at this stage is past the crenellations and upper two floors, that is, at a much later stage than that pictured by Hubert Robert. Compare the seventeenth-century print of the Bastille (p. 95), which clearly shows the arch centered on the long wall beneath those two floors, to Image 3.

13 These were men presumably in the employ of Pierre-François Palloy. On Palloy and his role in the destruction of the Bastille, see Guillaume Monsaingeon, “Le citoyen Palloy: détruire les murs, construire le mythe,” in Sous les pavés, la Bastille, pp. 127-134. During the demolition, which was completed in April 1791, the Bastille became a tourist site (p. 129).

14 One member of the Comité permanent, Dusaulx, reported on his July 15^th visit to the Bastille. On the interior, he found an enormous stone to which was attached a huge chain, subsequently removed by two other deputies. See L’Oeuvre des sept jours, published in Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, La Bastille est prise. La Révolution française commence, Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1988, pp. 139-169, and for the visit, p. 164. As the stones were cracked, the whiteness of the limestone blocks became visible.

15 L’Année littéraire, 1789, no. 40, lettre II, p. 19.

16 [L.H. Lefebure or Carmontelle], Vérités agréables ou le Salon vu en beau par l’auteur du Coup de Patte, Paris, 1789, in the Collection Deloynes, Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale (henceforth C.D.), vol. XVI, no. 415, p. 8.

17 Les éleves au Salon: ou l’Amphigouri, Paris: Chez Leconte, 1789, in the C.D., vol. XVI, no. 416, p. 196. This was mentioned by Bordes, “L’Art et le politique,” p. 108.

18 L’Année littéraire, 1789, no. 40, lettre XII, p. 268.

19 Hubert Robert not only collected Piranesi prints but the two artists were together in Rome and Cora. On this subject, see Piranèse et les Français 1740-1790, Rome: Edizione dell’Elefante, 1976, pp. 304-326, esp. 304-305. On Piranesi, see Roseline Bacou, Piranesi. Etchings and Engravings, Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975.

The position of the Bastille, its closeness to the frame, recall Piranesi’s Tomb of the Curiaci Brothers at Albano (ill. in Bacou, p. 85) while the small scale of the figures atop the building recall those at the Mausoleum of Hadrian in Piranesi’s Foundations of the Mausoleum of Hadrian (ill. in Bacou, p. 91.)

20 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 4^th ed., Dublin, 1767, pp. 102-103.

21 There are other early prints and drawings by Laurent Guyot dated 25 Juillet and 26 Juillet, that are in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and listed in Bruel et al.,eds., Collection de Vinck, vol. II, p. 89, nos. 1661, 1662.

22 Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink and Rolf Reichardt, trans. Norbert Schurer, The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997, p. 73 mention that the Bastille became a “double symbol (their italics): dungeon of despotism and symbol of victorious fight for freedom.”

23 See Lüsebrink and Reichardt, The Bastille and the brief essay by Michèle Menard, “Le Château, la forteresse, dans l’imagerie révolutionnaire,” in Michel Vovelle, ed., Les Images de la Révolution française, Paris: La Sorbonne, 1988, pp. 291-97, esp. 293 where she states that the Bastille becomes a “symbole de la liberté conquise.” Olander, “Pour Transmettre à la postérité: French Painting and Revolution, 1774-1795,” p.116, states that the Robert painting is “symbolic in its centralized, almost hieratic, presentation of the crumbling towers, whose weight and mass convey the feeling of what an enormous undertaking it wasBexpressed the dominant ideology of 1789: an optimistic, if naive, faith in the Revolution.”