Two Brutuses: Violence, Virtue, and Politics in the Visual Culture of the French Revolution

Two Brutuses:

Violence, Virtue, and Politics in the Visual Culture of the French Revolution


Je tenais les deux Brutus en grande vénération: le premier qui a tué son fils, 
le second qui a tué son père.


  —  1791 letter of Mme Cavaignac in which she describes her political affiliations 


Images of the ancient Roman statesman Brutus were ubiquitous during the French Revolution, embodying evolving ideals of civic virtue. In addition to his presence in the paintings and sculptures of the Revolutionary salons, busts of Brutus became pervasive symbols of rectitude for republicans and royalists alike.¹ Such images were displayed in Jacobin clubs, public buildings, and popular societies. In 1792, Joseph Boiston’s marble bust of Brutus was presented to, and subsequently exhibited at, the National Assembly and later the National Convention (figure 1).² In keeping with Revolutionary fervor, towns were renamed Brutus, even babies were named Brutus, and adult citizens adopted the name as well.³ Altars to Brutus were erected in churches.⁴ Brutus permeated the private, civic, and religious realms, as well as the intimate and quotidian. There were reproductions of his image on plates, playing cards, and Sèvres porcelain.⁵ Brutus was depicted on buttons worn during Revolutionary festivals. Although scholars have noted the ubiquity of such images during the French Revolution, only rarely have they studied the specifics of the Brutus figure, frequently failing to distinguish carefully which of the two Roman Brutuses French Revolutionaries painted, wrote about, and celebrated, and, most importantly, the significance and particular identifications with one or the other Brutus in specific contexts.⁶ The first — and possibly mythical — figure, Lucius Junius Brutus, avenged the rape of Lucretia, expelled the Tarquins from Rome, founded the Roman Republic, and later condemned his sons to death for treason after they conspired with the vanquished Tarquins in the sixth century B.C.⁷ The second, Marcus Junius Brutus (ca. 85–43 B.C.), considered a descendant of the first, assassinated Caesar, who was rumored, by Plutarch among others, to be his father, in an attempt to preserve the republic founded by his forebear, Lucius Junius Brutus.⁸ 


In fact, Revolutionary culture was suffused with references to both Brutuses. An examination of history painting and drama, as well as the political and visual cultures of the era, will demonstrate that French Revolutionaries made diverse appeals to the republican legacies of the two Brutuses in accordance with shifting political currents and the rhetorical dilemmas they posed. Offering the opportunity to envision political violence as the exercise of republican virtue, the figures of Brutus became central to making sense of the ongoing tumult of the French Revolution. Moreover, the poignancy of the familial theme in the Brutus stories appealed especially to French republicans who not only thought of their break from a patriarchal, aristocratic polity as an attack on the father of the nation — the king — but who also struggled to reconcile new political and social forms with the discourse of sensibilité and with an emergent ideology that asserted the bourgeois family as a model for political association. The stoic, masculine, republican virtues embodied by both Brutuses proved alluring and troubling for citizens facing such challenges, and shifting identifications with different aspects of the two Brutuses help explain the primacy of the Roman figures in political and artistic culture during the Revolution’s most radical phase. Brutus embodied the French Republic’s foundation upon Revolutionary violence; his image, therefore, waned from the cultural landscape in the post-Thermidor period. 


Exemplum Virtutis


Varying representations of both Lucius and Marcus Brutus created a confusion of identities, portraying Brutus as both a statesman and a family...