Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750–1870 by Suzanne Glover Lindsay (review)

What do monuments for the dead reveal about the living? And to what extent are these structures, which attempt to immortalize fallen heroes and departed loved ones, inextricably linked to the social and political climate of a specific time and place? These questions are at the heart of Suzanne Glover Lindsay’s Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult. Lindsay argues that modern effigy tomb sculpture “asserts that the individual existed (because he died), with an identifiable place in historical time;” her study explores how this monarchical—and, by the eighteenth century, out-dated and under-represented—form of funerary art was revitalized and transformed to embrace modern views of death and commemoration in nineteenth-century France (128). In demonstrating how the social, religious and civic concerns that shaped the metropolis were frequently replicated within the policies governing the necropolis, this study situates effigies within a broader context in order to explore how a modern, urban people went about, as the subtitle cleverly states, living with the dead in France.

In spite of a somewhat narrow focus on a particular type of sculpture—the recumbent effigy (gisant) that reproduces the corpse of the deceased—Lindsay’s text nevertheless embraces an interdisciplinary approach, with a particular emphasis on how funerary sculpture regularly intersected with issues of architecture (notably the buildings that housed funerary monuments) and landscape (in the form of outdoor, garden-like cemeteries). Looking at burial and commemorative practices during a time of social and political upheaval, Lindsay argues that changes in funerary practices that began in the eighteenth century—caused by the public health crisis resulting from a too-close contact with the dead and the disruption of the Revolution—forced an obstinate populace to advocate for the continued proximity of their deceased friends and family members. While the nineteenth-century city is often discussed as a site of increasing distance and alienation, the cemetery remained a space that drew diverse communities of mourners together, so that “by way of this physical and psychological intimacy, the effigy tomb fulfills the promise of union and reunion across the mortal threshold given at the funeral” (202).

Beginning and ending the book with detailed readings of Godefroy Cavaignac’s tomb in the Montmartre cemetery, executed by sculptors François Rude and Ernest Christophe, Lindsay documents a dramatic shift in funerary sculpture. Using an older, royal form of tomb sculpture to commemorate the legacy of this modern republican, the sculptors (as well as the committee appointed to erect the monument) took a politically-loaded form and adapted it for a radical new political purpose. While stressing its importance as a work of art that appeared during France’s period of “statuemania,” Lindsay links its artistic and historical significance by demonstrating the extent to which tombs were uniquely tolerated oppositional monuments when situated within the public spaces of the urban cemetery, even throughout the most repressive years of the July Monarchy and Second Empire.

The first two chapters of Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult explore eighteenth-and nineteenth-century attitudes toward the dead and argue that a variety of funerary practices—from the memorial processions of political dissidents to the horrors of the royal exhumations and tomb desecrations during the Revolution—rendered burial sites as charged memory zones that played an important role in shaping national history. While these early chapters provide a broad overview of the beliefs and values that impacted burial rites, the later chapters that look at specific funerary projects—Bonchamps, the tombs of Louis-Philippe’s family, Napoléon, and Cavaignac—are stronger and more coherent explorations of the rather fraught use of funerary art as political discourse. From the conciliatory aim of the Bonchamps monument (with its emphasis on clemency for political enemies) erected by the Reconstruction government to the more “grassroots” organization and financing of the Cavaignac effigy, these various projects “emphasize the fluid threshold between tomb cult and...