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Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.1 (2000) 131-134



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Book Review

Identity, the Social, and Images of the French

Sean M. Quinlan,
Indiana University-Bloomington


Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David After the Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Pp. x + 373. $50.00 cloth.

Warren Roberts. Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis Prieur, Revolutionary Artists: The Public, the Populace, and Images of the French Revolution (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). Pp. xx + 370. $73.50 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Martin S. Staum. Minerva's Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996). Pp. xii + 342. $44.95 cloth.

Following in the wake of Marxism, the Annales paradigm, and the "linguistic turn," some of the most exciting scholarship produced on the French Revolution has focused on the languages, symbols, and practices that Revolutionary agents and actors utilized to shape and make sense of the momentous events unfolding about them. As a result, post-revisionist historians have become increasingly responsive to the ways in which the Revolution was experienced as a subjective event, both exhilarating and traumatic, that profoundly touched upon individual and collective identity. In very different ways, the three books under review explore both the elevated and everyday articulations of the Revolutionary encounter, and how it was expressed through a variety of aesthetic, literary, socioscientific, and quotidian means. In so doing, these works make substantive contributions to the broad historiography of the French Revolution.

Warren Roberts compares the careers of neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David and the neglected Jean-Louis Prieur (who, between June 1789 and September 1792, contributed to the successful collection, Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française). The two artists provide a useful study in contrasts through "number, subject, perspective, and style" (xv). Some parallels existed: David and Prieur intensely identified with the Revolution, following its radical course during the Year II; both sat on the Revolutionary Tribunal and were incarcerated after Thermidor. David secured his release and continued his prodigious career; yet Prieur was guillotined after the Germinal rising of 1795. What emerges, however, was their unique sociocultural perspectives: Roberts's study emphasizes the gulf between the "public sphere" or "public opinion" of elite culture (David) and the violence and sardonic humor of popular culture (Prieur), a distinction not only important for explaining the cultural origins of the Revolution, but also for explaining the revolutionary process itself. Drawing upon a wide array of scholarship (some surprising omissions notwithstanding), Warren's book is written in an engaging and accessible style, and can be used as an effective introduction to a number of historiographical and methodological issues concerning the French Revolution.

In the first part, Roberts analyzes Prieur's sixty-nine contributions to the Tableaux historiques, a stunning pictorial record that chronicled the early Revolution and the unraveling of political consensus. Although Prieur's illustrations of high politics were dryly descriptive, he was inspired by other scenes, particularly those involving popular activism, such as the intendant Bertier de Sauvigny recognizing Foulon's severed head (July 22, 1789) or Paris guarded by popular militants (July 12-13, 1789). In Prieur's crowd drawings, Roberts locates a reflective, [End Page 131] deliberate, and partisan mind. Prieur celebrated the popular contributions, not elite politics, that propelled the Revolution, whether in the return of the Baron de Besenval, the arrival of gunpowder stores at the Port Saint-Paul, or the requisition of arms from Chantilly. By use of repetition and collective movement, Prieur underscored popular unity with a "mordant" and "ironic" style, rendering the "righteous anger of the people, not their savage excess" (184).

In the second half, Roberts moves from his biographical study, Jean-Jacques David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and the French Revolution (1989), engaging in a selective analysis of David's public works: the incomplete Tennis Court Oath (1790-1792) and political festivals. Comparing his abstract idealism with that of Maximilien Robespierre, Roberts argues that David's artistic productions reveal an intensifying desire for unity, transparency, and obliteration of difference. Whereas Prieur documented the collapse of...

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