The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France by Richard Taws (review)

In suggesting that the temporary character of much of the French Revolution’s material culture points to a dynamic process of experimentation, this study closely scrutinizes new types of widely reproduced ephemeral objects. The category of the ‘ephemeral’ is made to cover an eclectic mix of objects, from assignats or paper money, almanacs, bureaucratic vignettes, certificates, caricatures, playing cards, and plaster models to the display of relics, festivals, and ritual performance. Richard Taws considers how aspects of these phenomena contributed to the making of individual subjectivities at a time when modern political collective identities were being forged. The designation ‘ephemeral’ ultimately serves the author’s wider claims about the social, political, and cultural upheavals of a period judged to constitute a crossroads or site of transformation between a world where nothing was thrown away and a world of modern, centralizing bureaucracy and consumerism, subject to anxiety, transience, obsolescence, and the fugitive. Finding uneasy resolutions, complexities, and ambiguities, Taws still succeeds in making a case for the study of history through the careful scrutiny and analysis of how material objects come about, function, are made, used, and responded to. The first chapter, on the Revolutionary currency of the assignat, raises pertinent issues about the anxieties that arise when concerns about authenticity come to the fore. The value of this initial focus is profitably realized in the final chapter, which deals with trompe l’œil caricatures of assignats produced after the downfall of Robespierre. These are said to mediate the trauma of the recent Revolutionary past through ‘repetitious mimicry’. Practices and procedures are certainly historically embedded and institutionally determined, just as they are also constantly mutable and subject to change. Whether the coming of the passport changed the nature of portraiture is, however, more contentious, for the issue of verisimilitude adhered to the counterfeit, or portrait, from at least the time of the Renaissance. It is therefore regrettable that the close and productive attention to the details of a given outward appearance, no matter how fleeting, omits considerations of ostensible size. A circular etching, probably intended to function as a snuff box cover (p. 116) measures just nine centimetres in diameter, so its reproduction here is almost double life-size, whereas there is no indication that the oil painting on canvas La Mort de Joseph Bara by Jacques-Louis David (p. 5) is much more than ten times larger than the etching and hardly belongs within a comparable overview. In our own era of easily accessible, though not always easily verifiable, digital reproduction, size should still matter, especially because the valid mission here is to move beyond considerations of what is being represented towards the insights that can be gleaned from how imagery constructs narrative. This book, then, addresses an important project and should encourage further critical elaboration on how different kinds of object shed light on the processes of history.