Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Paris: The Transformation of Signs by Richard Clay (review)

In this illuminating book Richard Clay offers a sophisticated reconsideration of iconoclasm in Paris during the French Revolution, refuting briskly the negative associations of revolutionary ‘vandalism’ that have plagued studies of the subject. Clay argues persuasively that the majority of Parisians in eighteenth-century France did not engage with images and objects on primarily aesthetic terms, but that they understood them nonetheless as possessing profound political or ritual values. These values were not, for the most part, considered intrinsic to the objects themselves. Following the Revolution’s irrevocable challenge to the religious or political meaning of visual signs, their physical integrity could not be guaranteed by reference to autonomous or eternal artistic criteria. Consequently, images and objects could be transformed via processes of semiosis that preceded, accompanied, and followed the act of breaking itself, distributed across a range of images, texts, and actions. Revolutionary iconoclasts, many of whom, such as François Daujon, were artists themselves, were, Clay suggests, sophisticated coders and decoders, attuned to the possibilities and significance of sign transformation and aware that breaking, as often as not, involved some form of re-making. Indeed, preservationist and iconoclastic processes were deeply enmeshed, as both revolutionaries and royalists alike legitimized their positions by reference to the treatment of objects. Displacing explanation of some of the Revolution’s major events, from economic and social factors towards a response to signs, Clay is particularly sensitive to the discourse on iconoclasm as it emerged between religious and political authorities—crucial in a world where Parisians were more familiar with traditional Catholic modes of reception than with their secular equivalents. Structured chronologically, the book focuses on case studies of different spaces of struggle over the meaning of signs in revolutionary Paris: the Barrière de la Conférence, the Bastille, Notre-Dame de Paris, Saint-Eustache, Sainte-Geneviève, Saint-Roch, Saint-Sulpice, the chapel of the Théatins, the place Louis XIII, the place Louis XV, the place Vendôme, the place des Victoires, and the Pont-Neuf. Although the majority of officially sanctioned iconoclasm occurred in 1793–94, Clay shows how this was grounded in a multifaceted set of concerns that by that time during the Revolution, but also before its outbreak, were well established; iconoclastic attacks on statues of kings, for example, involved a well-developed and frequently rehearsed set of behaviours and reactions. Shifting away from a unique focus on Jacobin sign transformation, Clay is therefore attentive to the differences in form and meaning contingent on an iconoclastic act’s situation in place and time, and to the fact that iconoclasm was ultimately unable to signify total consensus. Particularly fascinating are the discussion of iconoclasm against revolutionary signs and the analysis of discursive mediations between different official and non-official revolutionary factions—aspects of revolutionary iconoclasm that are too often ignored or suppressed. Although the book’s semiotic framework at times threatens to constrain, the richness of the historical detail presented here lends it a highly convincing specificity. Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, this is a significant contribution to our understanding of iconoclasm at one of its most crucial historical junctures.