LOW ART, POPULAR IMAGERYAND CIVIC COMMITMENT IN … · LOW ART, POPULAR IMAGERYAND CIVIC COMMITMENT...

LOW ART, POPULAR IMAGERY AND CIVIC

COMMITMENT IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

G E R R I T W A L C Z A K

In 1789 French artists became citizens among equals, free agents within the socialscheme of the indivisible sovereign nation. Citizenship implied political rights aswell as civic obligations, and hundreds of artistes-citoyens were to serve as electors,local administrators, government officials and volunteer soldiers in conse-quence.1 Some, like the most famous painter–politician of the French Revolution,Jacques-Louis David, had belonged to the artistic establishment of the AncienRegime, but the vast majority of committed artist–citizens had been excludedfrom the sphere of official art, namely from the privileged Royal Academy. Aftermuch petitioning, the National Assembly in 1791 succumbed to the combinedpressure of dissident academicians and independent artists. The Salon waswrestled away from the Royal Academy, resulting in a spectacular rise in thenumber of painters exhibiting.2 Quite a few of these new exhibitors were artistsof considerable merit, but the intrusion of even the least talented of painters intoa public space once reserved for the appraisal of ‘high’ art reached its peak in thepolitical confusion of 1793, when the Salon was overloaded with new names.3

Their participation was the token of the new freedom that artists now enjoyed,and these artistic beneficiaries of egalitarianism were the true sans-culottes of theSalon.

Through a case study devoted to one of the new names of the Salon of 1793,I explore here some of the complex relations between ‘low’ art and revolutionarypolitics.4 A painter of minor talent and duly forgotten, Jean-Jacques Hauer (1751–1829) was an artist–citizen serving with the local militia, and a humble practi-tioner enjoying his greatest success at the height of collective militancy known asthe sans-culotte movement.5 The French Revolution allowed him to go public, andmost of his œuvre is closely tied to its tangled politics, his subject matter rangingfrom General Lafayette to Louis XVII. A closer look at the creation of the greatestmasterpiece of French Revolutionary art will inevitably draw attention to thisartist too, for Hauer was faster than David in responding to the assassination ofJean-Paul Marat in July 1793.

The lack of a genuine ‘art revolutionnaire’ was deplored by contemporary criticsthroughout the 1790s.6 Their aesthetic standards were inherited from the AncienRegime, inducing these writers to turn away from works which, if only becausethey were badly painted, failed to meet conventions of taste. According to critics,

ART HISTORY . ISSN 0141-6790 . VOL 30 NO 2 . APRIL 2007 pp 247–277& Association of Art Historians 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 2479600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

5.1 Jean-Jacques Hauer, The Assassination of Marat, 1794. Oil on canvas, 60 � 49 cm. Versailles: Musee

Lambinet.

L O W A R T, P O P U L A R I M A G E R Y A N D C I V I C C O M M I T M E N T I N T H E F R E N C H R E V O L U T I O N

248 & ASSOCIATION OF ART HISTORIANS 2007

the Salon of 1793 was a ‘fatras de production ineptes’ (‘a jumble of fecklessproductions’) largely composed of ‘barbouillages soi-disant patriotiques’ (‘daubsclaimed to be patriotic’), though conservative denigrations along this line couldonly be published after the bloody roll-back under the Thermidorian Conven-tion.7 If, artistically, the Salon of 1793 was a disappointment, this was preciselybecause it had been meant to be a sans-culotte exhibition, which was organized as ademocratic art show for the new egalitarian public. Only two days before theSalon opened its doors on 10 August, the spokesman of the Committee of PublicInstruction, Henri Gregoire, in a report read before the National Convention,neatly summed up the ideology behind this democratization of the Salon:‘Genius, and we say this bluntly, almost always the true genius is sans-culotte.’8 Asfar as artistic genius is concerned, Gregoire was proved wrong by the outcome,but he did indeed get a sans-culotte exhibition, even though many of the new-comers showed little interest in treating subject matter related to the history andachievements of the Revolution.9

Albert Soboul’s marxist interpretation of the sans-culotterie from the Parisiansections as a ‘popular mass-movement’ has prompted sustained debate ever sinceits publication nearly half a century ago.10 Historians challenging Soboul’s viewhave scrutinized members of these local administrations for their bourgeoisbackground, describing them as property owners, shopkeepers, master-artisansand clerks, men who had already taken part in the ‘liberal’ revolution of 1789 on alocal level.11 One particular group of middle-class professionals among the sans-culottes in the Parisian sections supporting this interpretation are the painters,sculptors and engravers themselves. Next to a much larger number of thoseworking in the field of applied or decorative arts, Soboul’s own repertory ofsectionary personnel contains the names of some eighty men, who were, in thestrictest sense of the term, artists, Jean-Jacques Hauer among them.12 Yet theimpact of this transformation of the bourgeois into a citizen, and of the citizeninto a sans-culotte, on the production of art, let alone on its appraisal, is difficult togauge. The republican discourse of equality eventually gave the ideal citizen adistinctly plebeian touch, however well-to-do and educated he may have been.13

Sans-culotte rhetoric, straightforward and blunt, suggests that formal aspects ingeneral were of little concern to true patriots. As a petition of sectionaries to theNational Convention insisted, ‘les vrais Republicains, les sans-culottes, ne savent pointfaire des phrases’ (‘the true republicans, the sans-culottes, do not know how tomake phrases’), but if these brave citizens were asking for nothing less thanrepresentations of martyrs of the Revolution ‘tels qu’ils ont ete peints par le citoyenDavid’ (‘such as those painted by the citizen David’), there is abundant evidencethat painted plaster casts of the busts of Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeauand Marat, cheap specimens of ‘low’ art, satisfied their demands equally well.14

Much to the benefit of Hauer and others like him, many of those who proved mostagitated by revolutionary politics refused to pay much attention to conventionalstandards of artistic excellence.

C I T I Z E N S I N A R M SBorn in the small town of Algesheim near Mainz in 1751, Johann Jakob Hauerreceived his initial training with Johann Philipp Hoffmeister at Mannheim beforeleaving Germany, but his entire career in France before the Revolution remains a


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matter of conjecture. While he is said to have spent some time at the municipaldrawing school at Arras, the sole proof of his activity as an artist seems to be ahistory painting copied from a print after Jean-Baptiste Nattier’s Joseph fleeingPotiphar’s Wife.15 If Hauer stayed in Arras before his arrival in Paris in 1774, hemight have got in touch with Dominique Doncre, a provincial painter of genrescenes and small portraits, who had settled in Arras in 1772. Although GeorgesDuval, a young man just out of college in 1789, became acquainted with Haueronly after the Restoration, his Souvenirs de la Terreur are the main source on whatbecame of the artist from the beginning of the Revolution.16 According to Duval,Hauer was living at the corner of the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arcs and the rueContrescarpe in the densely populated heart of the old quarters on the ‘rivegauche’ of Paris. Like most of his neighbours, the painter paid a moderate capi-tation tax only, but those 15 livres imposed on him were sufficient for the quali-fication as a citoyen actif under the census introduced when the deputies to theEstates-General were to be elected in April 1789.17 After the city’s local adminis-tration was reorganized a year later, parts of the districts of the Cordeliers andSaint-Andre-des-Arcs formed the Section du Theatre-Francais. This was laternamed the Section de Marseilles before being changed into the Section de Maratin the summer of 1793. Thus the artist lived in one of the most radical quarters ofParis, for this was the section from which Jean-Paul Marat, Camille Desmoulins,Philippe-Francois Fabre d’Eglantine and a number of other revolutionaries movedinto national politics. Georges-Jacques Danton was already presiding over theCordeliers’ general assembly at the beginning of the Revolution, and hissuccessor, the engraver Antoine-Francois Sergent, was one of three Jacobin artistseventually elected into the National Convention.

Shortly after the upheaval of July 1789 Hauer appears to have volunteered forthe militia organized in the Cordeliers district as the local branch of the ‘GardeNationale Parisienne’, the first mass organization to come into being in the FrenchRevolution. Hauer was not the only painter in his quarter to join this battalion ofthe National Guard: Pierre-Alexandre Wille, an agree of the Royal Academy, enlistedin the first days of the insurrection, became battalion commander in June 1791,and served as one of the six division commanders of Paris from April to August1792.18 In 1793 Hauer was elected capitain aide-majeur (the battalion commander’sadjutant), serving at least a three-month term before the beginning of the repub-lican calendar in September.19 The painter must have held the rank of a captain ofone of the battalions’ companies when elected to his new charge, and he is likely tohave resumed this position after completing his term at battalion level.

Members of the military and their families were the subject of a groupportrait which may be the first surviving painting that Hauer executed during theRevolution. It has hitherto been regarded as the work of an anonymous Frenchartist of the early nineteenth century (plate 5.2).20 Watched by a pet dog in theforeground, ten people from infancy to old age are posing awkwardly in aninterior. The most striking feature is the showy uniform of three of thoseportrayed, which won the painting its earlier title as a ‘Military Family Portrait’.The dark blue coats with white lapels, red collars, trim and cuffs are easilyidentified as the uniform adopted by the Parisian National Guard. The colourof the cuffs was changed from red to white after the first anniversary of theRevolution, when a national standard, based on the Paris model, was introduced,



along with the interior, costumes and hairstyles, which permit a fairly precisedating of this group portrait between August 1789 and July 1790. This uniformbecame a ‘habit national’, symbolizing the rights as well as the duties of citizen-ship through service in the revolutionary militia, which was essentially middleclass and excluded only those too poor to register until its ranks were eventuallyopened to these citoyens passifs in July 1792.21 Two of the guardsmen are wearingwhite waistcoats and breeches, the standard uniform of the National Guardinfantry, while the one to the right additionally displays the epaulettes and redsash of a captain. Wearing the same coat, but with a blue waistcoat and breeches,the third citizen-soldier belongs to the ‘Chasseurs’, a mounted unit of theNational Guard formed in October 1789 to provide security at the city’s barriers,river ports and markets.

None of these National Guardsmen have been identified, nor is it clearwhether some special event is commemorated. The portrait certainly bears

5.2 Jean-Jacques Hauer (attrib.), Family Portrait with National Guard Officers,

c. 1789–90. Oil on canvas, 61.3 � 50.2 cm. New York: The Metropolitan

Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection.



witness, however, to the pride taken by citizens in the volunteer militia, ‘lasoldatesque bourgeoisie de notre ville de Paris’ (‘the bourgeois soldiery of our city ofParis’).22 The first portraits of National Guardsmen seem to have been paintedsoon after the militia’s creation, and at least one, the Citoyen Nau-Deville, enuniforme de la garde nationale by Jean-Francois Bellier, was exhibited at the Salon of1791 (Paris: Musee Carnavalet).23 The uniforms of the three part-time soldiers inHauer’s portrait denote a fairly common shift in portraiture from private identityto public commitment. This transition was largely due to non-academic outsiders,that is, to painters whose prices did not put too much of a strain on the purses ofmiddle-class bourgeois. Like Hauer, though more accomplished, such artists weregenre painters and portraitists primarily working in small formats, among themLouis-Leopold Boilly and Dominique Doncre.24 One example showing a NationalGuard officer is the small full-length portrait of a M. Estelle, a lace merchant inthe rue Saint-Honore, wearing the uniform of a captain of the ‘Chasseurs’ of theNational Guard, by Jean-Marie Hooghstoel (plate 5.3). Hooghstoel was another

5.3 Jean-Marie Hooghstoel, M. Estelle, lace merchant in the rue Saint-Honore,

wearing the uniform of a captain of the ‘Chasseurs’ of the National Guard, 1790.

Oil on canvas, 45.5 � 37.5 cm. Paris: Musee Carnavalet.



minor artist who, although academically trained, made his public debut at theSalon of 1793.

The attribution of the New York group portrait to Hauer (plate 5.1) is primarilybased on comparison with a work by Hauer of 1791 (plate 5.4), where the centralfigures are General Gilbert du Motier Lafayette, the commandant-general of theParisian National Guard, and his wife Adrienne de Noailles. Both paintings arestrongly coloured, with the same clear outlines, and the same weaknesses inperspective and anatomical proportion. This revolutionary conversation pieceshows the Lafayettes in a drawingroom fantastically decorated withbusts of Honore-Gabriel Riquetti,Comte de Mirabeau, Andre Desilles,Benjamin Franklin and Jean-JacquesRousseau.25 On the harpsichord sits acopy of the Ca Ira, while on the chairlies the Gazette Nationale, ou Le MoniteurUniversel of 5 March 1791. Meanwhile,Adrienne de Noailles is depicteddrawing a triumphal arch under herhusband’s direction for the Fete dela Federation of 14 July 1791.26 Thefront page of the Moniteur contains aletter from a National Guard soldierglorifying the role of the armed citi-zenry on the evening of 28 February1791, where it had fought ‘sept a huitcent assassins, ci-devant nobles’ (‘sevento eight hundred assassins, formernoblemen’) ready to penetrate into theTuileries and abduct the king.27 Thespectre of these ‘chevaliers du poignard’(‘knights of the daggers’) would be re-invoked by the Jacobins after the assassinations of Louis-Michel Le Peletier deSaint-Fargeau and Marat two years later, but in 1791 this incident helped to savethe National Guard’s reputation. On the afternoon of 28 February its units hadclashed with the populace in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine instead of heroicallyfighting off counter-revolutionary plotters. Estrangement between the peopleand their militia ultimately culminated in the massacre on the Champ de Marson 17 July, when guardsmen fired into the crowds only three days after thesecond Festival of the Federation.28 Although the bust of Mirabeau suggests adate later than April 1791, Hauer’s conversation piece clearly draws on Lafayette’spopularity, as exploited by Philibert-Louis Debucourt in a mezzotint publishedthe year before (plate 5.5).29 The engraver Debucourt was an agree of the RoyalAcademy, who had cleverly dedicated his portrait of Lafayette, ‘aux CitoyensSoldats’, which may well have helped to promote its sale among proud citizen-soldiers.

Volunteer service by painters, sculptors and engravers in the armed citizenryis a form of commitment frequently overlooked by art historians. Hauer and

5.4 Jean-Jacques Hauer, General Lafayette and his

Wife, 1791. Oil on canvas, 93.3 � 74.6 cm. Ann

Arbor: The University of Michigan Art Museum.



fellow artist Pierre-Alexandre Wille (1748–1821) were far from exceptional, forquite a number of artists in other Parisian sections reached similar positions offirst and second battalion commander, including Louis-Gabriel Moreau, MatthiasHalm, Jean Duplessi-Bertaux and Piat-Joseph Sauvage. By serving in the militiathey attained a new social status defined by patriotic commitment at the cost ofprofessional identity. Uniforms had to be purchased at the artists’ own expense,while guard duties kept painters out of their studios. Like any other form of civiccommitment, a painter’s career as an unpaid National Guard volunteer speaksmore about his political sympathies in the French Revolution than his art, whichmight rather reflect the ideological preferences of his clientele, the public he wascourting, or the state, whose commissions could compensate for the loss of courtpatronage and the emigration of affluent collectors. Thus it seems rathersurprising that there are no self-portraits of Paris-based artists in National Guarduniforms; the sole example by a provincial artist is a gouache executed around1790 by Jean Hans, a painter settled in Strasbourg.30

T H E A S S A S S I N AT I O N O F M A R ATStabbed with a kitchen knife, Jean-Paul Marat died a martyr in his famous bath onthe evening of 13 July 1793.31 Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday, a Girondin sympa-thizer from Caen, was arrested before she could leave Marat’s apartment in therue Cordeliers, just a few streets from Hauer’s address. Soon the sectionary militiarushed to the scene, taking up posts inside the house, where the first interroga-tion took place, and trying to cope with the crowds gathering in the area. Corday

5.5 Philibert-Louis Debucourt,

General Lafayette, 1790. Mezzotint,

48.5 � 40.5 cm. Berlin:

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin,

Kupferstichkabinett.



was transported to the Abbaye prison, but two days later she was transferred tothe Conciergerie, the prison that adjoined the seat of the Tribunal revolutionnaire(Revolutionary Tribunal). From her cell, Corday wrote on 15 July to the Comite desurete generale (Committee of General Security), in which general police powerswere vested, requesting that a miniaturist be sent for a portrait sitting.32 The‘friends’ to whom she wanted to leave her portrait were not specified in this note,but a second letter to the Girondin Conventionnel Jean Barbaroux, written thenext day, made clear that she was not thinking of a private memorial, for sheinformed him of her intention ‘de faire hommage de mon portrait au departement duCalvados’ (‘to present my portrait to the departement of Calvados’).33 Expelledfrom the National Convention, Barbaroux had sought refuge in Caen, and Cordayplanned to send her portrait to his circle of Girondins back home. Her letter to theCommittee of General Security was left without answer, but it was read before theRevolutionary Tribunal where Corday stood trial on 17 July. A few weeks laterJacques-Louis David was to become a member of the Committee of GeneralSecurity to which she had written, and Corday might have encountered no fewerthan five artists serving among the jurors of the Revolutionary Tribunal, thoughthe latter had yet to be re-organized as an efficient instrument of terror.34 Amongthe audience at the trial, however, was a painter who tried to make a sketch ofCorday, the Paris newspaper Thermometre du jour reported a week later:

While she was being interrogated, a painter said to be the citizen Havre, pupil of David, took

her likeness; she became aware of this. Go on, she said to him, do not worry about me changing

my pose.35

This ‘Havre’ is none other than Jean-Jacques Hauer (plate 5.6), even though hecertainly never studied under David.36

A number of other painters claimed to have sketched the assassin in thecourtroom while one artist (Brard) was honest enough to admit that he had onlyglimpsed Corday as she was being taken to the guillotine early in the eveningalthough this did not prevent him from depicting her, knife in hand, next to thefamous bathtub.37 One of the artists in the courtroom was Francois Garnerey,who indeed was a student of David, which may account for the journal’ssuggestion that Hauer had studied under this master.38 Another newspaper,however, the Journal de Perlet, specified that Hauer had even been given animprovised sitting with the murderess right after her condemnation:

He was admitted [to her cell] in the interval that separated her judgement from the execution.

It was there where he completed the drawing he had made when sitting in the audience.39

This sitting was cut short by the arrival of the executioner after some sixty toninety minutes, and the initiative had been taken by Corday herself, as Duvalpointed out:

She had him called into the room in which she had been confined to await the execution. She

asked to see the portrait, found that its resemblance was not quite exact, and offered, in order

to finish it, to sit for him during the little time left for her to live.40



Hauer would hardly have been given permission to be incarcerated withCorday if he had not enjoyed a solid reputation as an officer of the NationalGuard in Marat’s own section. Though there is no way of telling whether he wasserving as the adjutant of his battalion in July, it is evident that his rank must havebeen that of an officer throughout 1793. This standing within the revolutionarymilitia granted him a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the last chance to draw alikeness of the exceptional woman about whom everyone in Paris was talking.

When Corday was taken to theguillotine, Hauer left the Revolu-tionary Tribunal with a drawing,usually assumed to be the half-lengthcomposition now in the MuseeLambinet.41 Whether finished duringthis sitting or derived from a first studynow lost, this drawing clearly served asthe basis for Hauer’s well-known oilpainting of Corday (plate 5.6).

The day before Corday’s trialMarat’s embalmed corpse wasdisplayed in the assembly hall of theCordeliers Club in a solemn ceremonydevised by David as a first step to turnMarat into a martyr saint of the Revo-lution. This worked all the betterbecause a model for his transforma-tion was readily at hand: on 20January 1793 the Conventionnel Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeauhad been stabbed in a restaurant by aformer royal guard for having votedfor the death of the king. On 29 March

David offered the Convention his (now-lost) Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau on hisDeathbed, which was hung with great ceremony above the President’s chair.42

Within a week or two after 13 July, publishers disseminated a multitude ofengraved effigies of Marat, mostly derived from existing portraits.43 New effigieswere produced as rapidly: Corday was being interrogated in an adjacent room onthe evening of 13 July when the sculptor Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet arrived at thecrime scene to take a death mask for a bust of the victim (whereaboutsunknown).44 The next morning a deputation from the Contrat-Social section wasallowed to speak before the National Convention, addressing David, whopromised to paint what was to become his famous Marat:

Where are you, David? You have passed on to posterity the effigy of Le Peletier dying for his

country; there is yet another picture to be painted.45

From the moment of his death the memory of Marat was inevitably linked tothat of Corday. She was a heroine to the moderates, a monster to the radicals, and

5.6 Jean-Jacques Hauer, Charlotte Corday, 1793.

Oil on canvas, 60 � 47 cm. Versailles: Musee

national du chateau.



an object of curiosity to both. The date 13 July 1793 created an insatiable appetitefor images, but any depiction of Corday would inevitably become part of whatJacques Guilhaumou has described as a ‘war of portraits’.46 On 21 July sectionaryrepresentatives in the department of Paris discussed ways to counter ‘tous lescontre-revolutionnaires, les moderes, les federalistes’ (‘all the counter-revolutionaries,the moderates, the federalists’), who were writing eulogies to the assassin,deciding publicly to post an officialvilification of Corday.47 For the samereasons a sans-culotte formerly known asthe Marquis de Sade later spoke outagainst those ‘artistes trop credules’(‘overly credulous artists’) who haddared to represent the murderess ‘sousl’embleme enchanteur de la beaute’ (‘underthe enchanting mask of beauty’).48

Corday had desired to go down inhistory as the heroine who killed themost bloodthirsty of all revolutionaryleaders; any ordinary portrait wouldprove that she was not the hideouscreature that the authorities claimedher to be. Hauer did not launchengravings based on his oil portrait,not because it was too dangerous butbecause he wanted something evenmore spectacular. In the colourengraving executed by Pierre-Marie Alixafter the drawing sketched by FrancoisGarnerey in the courtroom on 17 JulyCorday is shown as a young womanwho looks as harmless as in the oil portrait painted by Hauer.49 The inscription onthe engraving announces that a portrait of Marat ‘paroitra dans la meme grandeur d’icia deux mois’ (‘will appear in the same dimensions within two months’), indicatingthat her image would be counterbalanced by one of Marat.50

Details of the sitting given to Hauer received press coverage and on 27 July theJournal de Perlet announced the appearance of a stipple engraving of Corday byJean-Jacques-Francois Tassaert after a portrait drawn by Hauer (plate 5.7). Withinfour days of the sitting and the sitter’s execution, Hauer had contracted theengraver and printer Jean-Louis Anselin, under whose supervision Tassaert wasworking in the nearby rue du Theatre-Francais. The painter agreed to pay Anselin300 livres for the engraved plate and to share the printing costs and profits in a‘fifty-fifty’ arrangement.51 Hauer supplied his engraver with a drawing (now lost)quite different from his oil painting: a three-quarter-length study of Cordaydressed in black and wearing a high, black conical hat.52 Corday is portrayed as amodern Judith, clasping the knife that she had thrust deep into Marat’s chest. Herleft hand rests on her hip, adding a note of pride to the evocation of a womanapparently so dangerous, and a tiny circular vignette below serves as a reminderof her historical intervention. This triumphant figure might indeed be the agent

5.7 Jean-Jacques-Francois Tassaert after Jean-

Jacques Hauer, Charlotte Corday, 1793. Engraving,

30.6 � 22.8 cm. Hamburg: Hamburger

Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett.



of a most hideous crime, but she might equally well be a heroine of admirabledetermination. Hauer and Tassaert present Corday as an extraordinary womancapable of killing, but the rest is open to interpretation. Ambiguous images ofthis kind were much in demand from the ‘muscadins’ and the ‘petites maıtresses’whom the police closely monitored in the shops of print dealers, overhearingthem say that ‘jamais femme ne fut si audacieuse, si interessante, veritable heroıne’(‘never was a woman as audacious, as interesting, as veritable a heroine’).53

It is well known that David took two and a half months to paint his Marat, andpresented it to the public in the courtyard of the Louvre on 16 October 1793, theday Queen Marie-Antoinette was sent to the guillotine.54 The Salon opened itsdoors barely four weeks after Marat’s death, and Hauer enjoyed a short-livedfame. His Assassination of Marat exhibited at the Salon two months before Davidpresented his more famous painting, is lost, but a replica, dated 1794,has survived (plate 5.1).55 A kind of revolutionary cabinet-piece, Hauer’sAssassination of Marat shows Corday, knife in hand, about to leave Marat’sapartment, looking back on the bloodstained corpse. The figure of Corday isclose to that in the engraving by Tassaert, even though in the painting shewears a white dress. Only her physiognomy can claim an authenticity derivedfrom the sitting of 17 July 1793.

The public display of this composition has recently been deemed ‘a consid-erable risk to the artist’.56 But the painter did not take sides, following thestrategy he had employed for the engraving.57 In Hauer’s modest historypainting, Corday has accomplished the action she had been resolved to carry out.Whatever opinions he may have held, Hauer did not encourage any particularinterpretation and visualized the assassination as it might have taken place,deliberately undercutting the conventions of history painting by leaving it opento interpretation. Marat’s assassination was immediately recognized as a majorepisode in the French Revolution’s contemporary, or ‘modern’, history. Itsdepiction, therefore, was not controversial unless the event was exploited tocreate an apotheosis of Corday. Among the entrants for the Robespierrist artcompetition of April 1794 at the height of the Terror the title of a painting Maratassassine par Charlotte Corday (untraced) by Jean-Louis Messier suggested that thisparticular artist had no reservations about including a murderess in a paintingsubmitted to a state jury.58

David certainly sided with the radical Jacobins, but he was facing the task ofpainting a pendant to his Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau on his Deathbed (now lost) at theinstigation of a pro-Maratist deputation, destined to be hung alongside his firstmartyr portrait in the National Convention. From the moment of its conceptionDavid’s representation of Marat had never been intended to depict the assassi-nation. There was no place for Corday in David’s painting, just as there had beenno question of introducing Philippe Paris, the assassin of Le Peletier, in the firstpainting of a stabbed Conventionnel.59 At the Salon of 1793 David’s pendantswere only indirectly present through the drawing of Anatole Devosge after the LePeletier (plate 5.8), but a critic of the original indicates that the reception was at anaesthetic rather than exclusively political register: ‘Ce sujet moderne est traite avectoute la noblesse et le sentiment de l’antique.’ (‘This modern subject is treated with allthe nobility and sentiment of the antique.’)60 Hauer had treated a modernsubject, too, but he stayed within the limits of revolutionary history that David



transcended. David charged his depiction of a corpse with a plethora of visual aswell as textual allusions: blood dripping from the sword which hangs on a singlehair above the victim, the name of the murderer engraved on the blade, the words‘Je vote la mort du tyran’ written on the sheet of paper pierced by the sword. Theseallusions generate a meaning absent in Hauer’s more modest contribution for hecreated a painting which was sans-culotte in style but not in content. David’s LePeletier, on the other hand, was conceived as an ‘unambiguous piece of Jacobinpropaganda’61 – as was his Marat.

Another of the numerous newcomers in the overcrowded Salon of 1793 wasAuguste Sandoz, who exhibited Le portrait de Marat next to Le portrait de Marie-AnneCordey [sic], which were put on display only a few weeks after the opening of theSalon.62 Both paintings are generally considered to be lost, but I would like toidentify them as an anonymous pair of small portraits at the Musee Carnavaletwhich are the portraits of Marat and Corday, the only pair known in oils (plates5.9 and 5.10).63 Sandoz worked for an engraver, Francois Bonneville, who claimedto have drawn Corday ‘d’apres nature’ (‘after nature’), publishing three portraits ofher, one of which was announced in the press on 13 September, while a second

5.8 Anatole Devosges after Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Lepeletier de

Saint-Fargeau, 1793. Pencil, 46.7 � 40 cm. Dijon: Musee des beaux-arts.



was clearly modelled after the portrait that Tassaert had engraved after Hauer.64

Sandoz engraved a third print for this publisher which combined elements fromHauer and Bonneville; he executed a portrait of Marat a few weeks before theassassination, which in turn was modelled on a portrait by a competentdraughtsman closely attached to the print market, Claude-Louis Desrais.65 Whilesuch a confusing genealogy is quite typical for engravings executed and printed inhaste (often trying to add an element of variation to whatever engraved ororiginal portrait was reproduced), the Carnavalet pendants draw freely on thisvariety of disparate sources. If the physiognomy of Corday was anonymized in theprocess, that of Marat became all the more accentuated.

Similarly to Hauer’s Death of Marat, the portrait at the Carnavalet (plate 5.9)shows Corday at the moment after the killing, knife in hand, looking down on theexpiring figure, but this is a historicized portrait not a history painting. The bustof Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau on top of an open writing desk puts Corday inideological perspective and Marat within the martyrology of the Revolution.66

Even though Corday, regarding Marat with innocence mixed with disgust, fitseven better into the traditional iconography of Judith than she does in any ofHauer’s representations, the agitator is not depicted as a modern Holofernes. LePeletier’s distinctive profile reappears in the pendant (plate 5.10) which showsMarat at his writing desk, holding a red phrygian cap in his left hand, and lookingat the same bust of the assassinated Conventionnel, whose fate prefigured hisown. Unlike Hauer, Sandoz unmistakeably took sides, offering a rather simplesolution to the definition of martyrdom, solved by David once his Marat wasplaced alongside his earlier Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, first on top of sarcophagi in

5.9 Auguste Sandoz (attrib.), Charlotte Corday, 1793. Oil on canvas, 39.5 � 33.5 cm. Paris: Musee

Carnavalet.

5.10 Auguste Sandoz (attrib.), Jean-Paul Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas, 39.5 � 33.5 cm. Paris: Musee

Carnavalet.



the Louvre courtyard, then inside the National Convention. In a paradoxical‘swapping’ of contexts, however, ‘low’ art was exhibited in the artistic sphere ofthe once elitist Salon, and ‘high’ displayed in the context of radically democraticpolitics.67

T H E R O YA L FA M I LYHauer was a battalion officer in the year that the moderates lost their battleagainst the advocates of the Terror, and within the framework of Soboul’s historyof the sans-culottes as much as in the light of more recent discussions, this citizen-artist must be numbered among the activist cadre of bourgeois-turned-militant.With the outbreak of the war against Austria, the Parisian National Guardunderwent considerable transformation, the most important aspect of which wasthe opening of its ranks to the poor by order of the municipal authorities on 17July 1792.68 In 1793 Hauer was a battalion commander’s adjutant and he nolonger served in the showy bourgeois militia whose members he had painted inthe group portrait early in the Revolution (see plate 5.2). His commandinggeneral, Lafayette, had defected to the Austrians in August 1792, and only fourweeks later National guardsmen of Hauer’s section formed the core of one of thevolunteer battalions which were hastily pieced together in Paris, eventuallymarching off to the Ardennes.69 Hauer’s remaining unit must now have resem-bled something of a genuine sans-culotte militia, an armed force short of uniformsand rifles, in part only fitted out with pikes and placed under the direct commandof the local Comite revolutionnaire (Revolutionary Committee). The electorate andadministrative personnel of his section, among them a number of artists, showeda remarkable stability until the general assembly and its committees were finally‘purged’ of suspected moderates in September 1793.70 Half a year later, part of thesection’s new commissaires were replaced again when the sectionary committeeswhich, hitherto, had acted almost entirely independently were brought undercontrol by the National Convention.71

After 27 July 1794 (9 Thermidor of the Year II, according to the republicancalendar), the reign of Terror ended in a massacre among its leaders in the twoexecutive committees of the National Convention.72 David, artist member of theComite de surete generale, escaped death, spending the rest of the year in prison, butsome ten artists who had held municipal offices went straight to the guillotine.73

Sectionary committees were scrutinized for ‘Robespierrists’, ‘Terrorists’ and‘Jacobins’, but only after the uprisings of April and May 1795 were their formerrank and file hard hit by recurrent waves of repression which continued well intothe Consulate.74 For example, the engraver Jean-Marie Mixelle, from the Sectionde Marat, was arrested on 15 May 1795 and denounced for having tried to defendRobespierre on the night of 9 Thermidor.75 Given that Hauer held a comparativelyhigh position in the sectionary militia, it seems rather surprising that none of thedenunciations, arrests and disarmaments so frequent in the course of revolu-tionary events seemed to taint the painter’s police record.76

Hauer took part in the next Salon exhibition yet none of the paintings hedisplayed in 1795 have survived. The livret of this first Salon since the end of theTerror contains short descriptions of two pendants whose subjects are the wareffort in town and country. A National Forge, a painting of workers happily singingpatriotic songs as they produce rifle barrels must have resembled a pre-industrial



workshop idyll of almost nostalgic qualities.77 Most national manufactures hadalready been closed under the Thermidorian Convention, and the production ofarms, uniforms and supplies was being handed back to private contractors. In AFarm, Hauer depicted the departure of a young farmer called to arms.78 This, too,was patriotic propaganda that was slightly out of date; another artistic outsider

named Petit-Coupray hadalready shown a similar work inthe Salon of 1793, when it wasdescribed at length in thelivret.79 The army raised by theJacobin levee en masse in 1793remained the nation’s principalfighting strength for the nextcouple of years, and a regulardraft system was introducedonly later.80 Given that Hauerstrove to exploit the patrioticsentiments which survived theTerror, a group of four compo-sitions not publicly exhibited bythe artist seems even moreenigmatic, as their subjectswere taken from the ordealsuffered by the royal family. Ifwe regard these paintings aspolitical statements, they seemto contradict much of what hasbeen said about this citizen-artist so far. Was Hauer aroyalist sympathizer, as hasrecently been suggested inrelation to this puzzling part ofhis œuvre?81

Thermidor entailed a breakwith the ideology of republican radicalism. The dismantling of its repressiveapparatus involuntarily gave rise to a renewed royalism, culminating in a full-blown uprising in Paris, put down in October 1795 at the cost of several hundredlives. Hauer was not alone in contributing to the imagery of the royal family inthe aftermath of Thermidor, but two of his four compositions were apparentlypainted before the end of the Terror (if they were not deliberately pre-dated by thepainter). The Last Confession of Louis XVI (plate 5.11) may well be the first oil paintingof its kind produced in Paris.82 Hauer’s cabinet-piece shows the king, sentenced todeath, in front of a candle-lit crucifix next to the Abbe Edgeworth de Firmont onthe night before his execution on 21 January 1793.83 The king had been put todeath in the name of the people, but Hauer depicted a moment least suited toinspire any kind of regicidal enthusiasm. When depicting Marat and Corday inthe same year the artist preferred not to take sides, but the assassination of the‘Ami du peuple’ (‘Friend of the people’) was an event of historical importance. The

5.11 Jean-Jacques Hauer, The Last Confession of Louis XVI,

1793. Oil on canvas, 32.5 � 34.5 cm. Versailles: Musee

Lambinet.



choice of this scene of privacy and devotion in a prison cell meant putting all theemphasis on the king. Within months of Louis’s beheading, English engraversflooded the London market with sentimental compositions in a similar vein.84

Among French emigre artists, Henri-Pierre Danloux painted a scene of royalintrospection close to Hauer’s in 1795, showing the imprisoned monarch writinghis testament (plate 5.12), and in 1796 Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun planned to repre-sent a subject that she aptly described as ‘un des moments touchants et solennels’ (‘oneof those touching and solemn moments’) preceding the death of Louis XVI andMarie-Antoinette.85

If the political ideas held by a single painter in Paris are of limited interest,his four royalist subjects, combined with what is known about his republicancommitment, raise larger questions about the relation between an artist and hiswork in times of revolution. Nothing is known about Hauer’s clientele, but even

5.12 Henri-Pierre Danloux, Louis XVI Writing his Testament, 1795. Oil on

canvas, 155 � 119 cm. Versailles: Musee national du chateau.



an artist of his modest abilities did not work for his own pleasure. Whencontracting Anselin and Tassaert for the engraving of Corday, he had business inmind, and the replicas of some of his paintings indicate that they were intendedfor purchasers. By staying away from sectionary committees, Hauer did notpresent himself as an extremist, but his status as an elected capitain aide-majeur(adjutant) of a sectionary battalion in 1793 makes him an unlikely royalistsympathizer. Yet this is the year, before any other painter in Paris dared to do so,that Hauer began to work on royal subjects in a sentimentalizing and thuscounter-revolutionary vein. After the taking of the Tuileries, the imprisonment ofthe royal family and the proclamation of the Republic, such images were notspecifically banned, though all feudal heraldry and titles (typically enumerated inthe inscriptions for engraved portraits) were declared illegal. A police report inMarch 1793 stated that print dealers were permitted to sell any kind of portrait aslong as they refrained from ‘accompagner l’effigie des ci-devants de titres qu’ils n’ontplus’ (‘accompanying the effigies of ‘‘ci-devants’’ with titles they no longerbear’).86

Over the course of the 1793 all distinction between these nominally legalimages and their potentially illegal inscriptions was put aside, and the shops ofprint dealers, especially along the rue de Saint-Jacques, came to be observedclosely by the Committee of Public Welfare of the department of Paris, whosefrequent seizures indicate that even under the Terror there was no lack of royalimagery in the capital.87 These seizures, however, were largely composed ofengravings produced in the years before or re-printed from existing plates. Themost notable exception was the Testament de Louis XVI, an anonymous engravingwith the text of the king’s last will, crowned with his portrait medallion. Whenpublished within a week of his execution, the impact of this print seems to havetaken the revolutionary authorities by surprise, but the mistake was made onlyonce.88 With their confinement in the Temple, the production of paintedportraits of members of the royal family came to a sudden end, save for a fewexceptions by Joseph-Marie Vien fils and Alexandre Kucharski.89 Under the loi dessuspects, one of the judicial foundations to the reign of Terror from September1793 to July 1794, even the possession of miniature portraits of members of theroyal family was not without danger, for if an accused carried such a portraitwhen arrested as a suspect, the Revolutionary Tribunal could not fail but regardthis as a proof of counter-revolutionary sympathies.90 The clandestine market forprinted effigies of royalty theoretically held considerable risks, too, but only onepublisher is known to have lost his life.91 Prohibition created a lucrative businessfor the dealers, simply because prices for anything illegal but much in demandrose as the pressure exerted by the police authorities increased.

The overthrow of the Robespierrist regime abruptly ended the most militantphase of the Revolution; from then on, the remaining radicals were most fearedby the National Convention. On 31 October 1794, only three months after Ther-midor, the engraver and print dealer Jean-Baptiste Verite tentatively submitted aproduction for official registration which had been modelled on the Englishimagery of royalist sentimentalism. Verite obtained permission to print and sellThe Separation of Louis XVI from his Family, but he was cautious enough to publish itanonymously. This engraving, depicting the last reunion of the royal family in theTemple the night before the king’s execution, was an immediate success, though



the claim that 50,000 copies had been sold seems exaggerated.92 Verite, it seems,was not the first to hope that the time had come to supply the market legally withsubjects taken from the less glorious, non-official part of the Revolution’s history.Hauer’s own Separation of Louis XVI from his Family (plate 5.13) is dated ‘1794/Germinal’, which means it was painted in March or April 1794, months before theend of the Terror.93 Watched by a National Guardsman and gaoler, the king takesleave of his wife, children and sister, calmly blessing the young Dauphin.Confinement in the Temple had reduced the royal household to something of abourgeois model family, and Hauer presents them with an awkward, but almostGreuze-like sentimental drama. Two replicas of this painting are known, onedated 1795, and Hauer made an engraving of his composition.94 Maybe he was toocautious to hand over his painting to the workshop of a professional engraver;maybe he simply preferred not to risk the expense of a contract similar to thatwith Ancelin and Tassaert for the portrait of Corday. Hauer’s sole engraving wasnever officially registered and is only known in a few copies.95

The emotional appeal of Hauer’s painting is remarkably close to an Englishprint of the Last Interview of Louis XVI and his Family, engraved after a painting byCharles Benazech (plate 5.14).96 This print, executed in London, appears to havebeen known to the draughtsman employed by Verite, an artist usually identifiedas the young art student Pierre Bouillon.97 Once the Robespierrist regime hadbeen overthrown, Bouillon supplied Verite with three more drawings of episodesrelated to the fate of the royal family during the Revolution, and in two cases hedirectly copied from English prints after Benazech. After the commercial successof the first of his prints, however, the publisher was clearly discouraged from

5.13 Jean-Jacques Hauer, The

Separation of Louis XVI from his

Family, 1794. Oil on canvas,

53 � 46 cm. Paris: Musee

Carnavalet.



continuing his series, which was ready for publication late in 1794. ClaudeLanglois has suggested that in portraying the circumstances of the royal family,artists were addressing a public interest in ‘what happened’, but acknowledgingthat any of these subjects belonging to the history of the Revolution meantre-writing it.98 Nonetheless, in 1795 Hauer painted The Separation of the Dauphinfrom his Mother (Paris: Musee Carnavalet) as a pendant to his Separation of Louis XVI

from his Family, depicting the heir to the throne being separated from Marie-Antoinette on 3 July 1793.99 The boy’s mother, sister and aunt are shown takingleave from the king in the first of the two paintings, and even a sans-culotte gaolerwith his red phrygian cap seems to be overcome by pity. As the child who had

been proclaimed Louis XVII by the king’s brothers in exile after the execution of hisfather, his presence in the Temple remained an embarrassment to the Thermi-dorian Convention until he succumbed to tuberculosis on 8 June 1795. By the endof the year royalist partisans in the Vendee had lost their battle; a landing ofemigre troops at Quiberon had proved a disaster; and the uprising in Paris hadbeen crushed. Because of the government’s fear of indigenous royalists, sellingimagery of this kind legally remained nearly impossible for several more years.Verite registered his prints on 20 November 1799, evidently hoping for a change inpolitics only a few days after the coup d’etat by Bonaparte, which officially endedthe Revolution. Although in March 1800 the police, it seems, seized three of the

5.14 Charles Benazech, The Separation of Louis XVI from his Family, 1794. Oil on canvas, 42 � 56 cm.

Versailles: Musee national du chateau.



drawings that Verite had commissioned from Bouillon, together with a stock oftwo hundred prints, the distribution of his productions was eventually toleratedby the authorities.100

Details of the interior of the Temple portrayed by Hauer in The Last Confession ofLouis XVI (plate 5.11), The Separation of Louis XVI from his Family (plate 5.13) and TheSeparation of the Dauphin from his Mother are far from authentic, indicating that theartist-officer never formed part of the National Guard detachments in charge ofthe prison.101 Watch duties were performed by rotating units from the Parisiansections; Georges Duval even started his National Guard service in the Temple.102

However, with the massive mobilization of the Parisian National Guard that wasto prevent unrest on the day of Louis XVI’s execution, Hauer probably became aneye-witness at one of the Revolution’s most symbolic events. By removing theking’s head, the blade of the guillotine on 21 January 1793 was meant to cut offall ties with the past. Fearing unrest, General Santerre, successor to Lafayette,expressly demanded ‘qu’il n’y ait dans les rues que des citoyens armes’ (‘that there areonly armed citizens in the streets’) that day.103 Many sections threatened to arrestany citizen without arms, ordering women to stay indoors and (always advisablewhen history is being written) to keep windows shut.

5.15 Jean-Jacques Hauer, The Execution of Louis XVI, 1795. Oil on canvas, 80 � 99 cm. Private

Collection.



The decapitation of the king was one of the great journees of the Revolution,an historical event taking place in full view of the armed masses as much as withtheir active participation. Its depiction might be used for revolutionary propa-ganda, though it was equally well suited for royalist hagiography. Hauer’s Execu-tion of Louis XVI (plate 5.15) of 1795 is one of the most historically accurateevocations of the event. It turns out, however, to be a rather contradictoryperformance in which the artist’s preoccupation with the splendour of the armedcitizenry in which he served is curiously at odds with the hagiographic elementshe introduced into the painting. A symmetrical composition places the guillotinein the centre and General Santerre on horseback in the foreground, framed bylovingly painted, orderly detachments of the National Guard to the left and of theGendarmerie to the right. The scenery unfolding in this painting was the same asthat represented, from a different angle, in the large engraving by IsidoreStanislas Helman after Charles Monnet, presented to the National Conventionsome ten weeks before Thermidor (plate 5.16).104 Here the fatal blade has alreadyfallen; on the scaffold the executioner’s aide holds the severed head aloft. A meredetail of some importance in the print, this brutal act of public exposure wasemphasized in more blatantly republican interpretations such as Jean-EtienneLesueur’s submission to the Robespierrist concours of April 1794, a drawing inwhich the king’s head is displayed to a crowd cheering and dancing before thescaffold.105 Yet the meaning of this act of triumph and humiliation is ambiguous,to say the least. In the inscriptions on a number of prints modelled after a Frenchetching and published abroad, the same severed head held high is defined as thegruesome climax of a state crime committed on a public stage.106

5.16 Isidore Stanislas Helman after Charles Monnet, The Execution of Louis XVI, 1794. Engraving,

26.4 � 43 cm. Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett.



Hauer, however, chose to depict an episode (plate 5.15) most dear to engraversabroad and to those holding royalist sympathies: Louis XVI is attempting to delivera last address, as Santerre, raising his sabre, commands the National Guardtambours to roll their drums, and the king remains unheard. Within the group ofmen on the scaffold, the king, with his name added in capital letters, is high-lighted by his white shirt and culottes. His confessor Edgeworth, standing at theleft edge of the platform, turns his head away from the scene, crying into ahandkerchief. One of the most successful English prints after a painting byBenazech, a much more concentrated composition in which the king tries tospeak at the moment before mounting the scaffold, was published on 1 February1795: here Edgeworth, raising his crucifix, stands next to him, in turn addressinghis last words to this descendant of Louis IX about to die, ‘Fils de saint Louis, montezau ciel.’107 Hauer’s composition is a compromise between conflicting aims. Hisdepiction of the king’s attempt to deliver an oral testament evidently clashes withthe painter’s desire to include a large number of orderly lined-up troops aroundthe scaffold. The Execution of Louis XVI is the only one of Hauer’s four paintings ofthe royal family in which the subject could well have assumed a republicanmeaning, but the artist made a point of designating the king as ‘Louis XVI’, not as‘Louis Capet’, the subject’s official republican name included in the legend of theHelman engraving.

What is to be made of these compositions by a revolutionary painter-officer?Self-expression cannot be regarded a plausible motive for any artistic productionundertaken during the French Revolution. It seems probable that Hauer had, likethe publisher Verite, fallen prey to a miscalculation, underestimating the hosti-lity from the authorities to subjects for which a public demand might be takenfor granted. The choice of ‘patriotic’ compositions that Hauer displayed at theSalon of 1795 was more appropriate to revolutionary civic commitment. Yetcoherence between ideology and art work was unusual, with the consistencydisplayed by David until the end of the Terror being almost the singular excep-tion. Even among his rivals there is ample proof of growing personal disillusion inthe midst of an unabating flow of pro-revolutionary productions. The statecompetition of April 1794 solicited entrants from minor artists and formeracademicians alike, but it is naıve to assume that the works they submittedsimply bore witness to their ‘revolutionary zeal’.108 Among the most competenthistory painters taking part in this competition were Francois-Andre Vincent, anacademician who had joined the Jacobin club only to be kicked out of thenational museum commission for a lack of patriotic candour in January 1794, andJoseph-Benoıt Suvee, once denounced by David as ‘le plus aristocrate de son corps’(‘the most aristocratic of his kind’), then imprisoned as a suspected counter-revolutionary even before the last submissions were handed in.109 The post-Thermidorian regime held fast to established republican imagery, but some ofthose artists persecuted for their share in the Terror took up surprising subjects:when spending some time in exile in Switzerland in 1796, Antoine-FrancoisSergent, having voted as a Conventionnel for the death of Louis XVI, produced acolour engraving of the king’s surviving daughter Marie-Therese-Charlotte, whohad recently been handed over to the Austrians after two and a half years ofconfinement in the Temple.110 In Paris, a miniature of this ‘Orphan of the Temple’was painted in 1795 by Jacques-Joseph Degault (plate 5.17).111 Degault had worked



for the Versailles court before the Revo-lution; had served during the Terror onthe Comite revolutionnaire of the Mont-Blanc section; was arrested as a deter-mined radical in April 1795; and wasonly released five months later.112

There is no reason to believe thatcircumstances allowed any of the minorfigures to be more consistent in theirrespective political sympathies, civiccommitment and artistic output beforeand after Thermidor. Satisfying thedemand for royalist imagery was notnecessarily motivated by the wish for there-establishment of the monarchy. Butthe small number of artists involvedbefore Thermidor, including Hauer withhis immaculate police record, was notcomposed of Robespierrist extremistseither. The Revolution’s course into amiddle-of-the-road regime, afraid offormer sans-culottes and indigenous

royalists alike, is reflected in the three paintings Hauer displayed at the Salon of1796 (nos 203-205). These moralizing genre pieces carried the following titles: Lebon et le mauvais exemple, Un veillard recevant des secours d’une famille charitable and Unjeune homme ivre et deux jeunes debauches. No exhibition was staged the followingyear, and by the time the next Salon opened its doors in 1798, a jury was estab-lished to keep out artists of lesser talent. The egalitarian experiment, which hadbrought Hauer into the Louvre, was over.

Notes

This article forms part of my forthcoming book on artists in Paris from the OldRegime to the French Revolution. I would like to thank Sophie Matthiesson forgenerously making available findings from her unpublished research, as well as forimproving my English where necessary. Thanks are also due to Dale L. Clifford, JamesD. Draper, Erich Hinkel, Bettina Greiner, Laurence B. Kanter and Andrea Worm fortheir help and suggestions.

1 On artists’ civic commitment, see AnnieJourdan, ‘Les artistes en revolution (1789–1815):De la diversite des engagements’, in MichelBiard, ed., Terminee la Revolution . . . IVe colloqueeuropeen de Calais, Calais, 2002, 161–76; DavidLloyd Dowd, ‘The French Revolution and thePainters’, French Historical Studies, 1:2, 1959,127–48.

2 The decree of 21 August 1791 by which theNational Assembly opened access to the Salon,

as well as the discussions preceding this deci-sion, are documented in Sigismond Lacroix,ed., Actes de la Commune de Paris pendant laRevolution, 2nd series, 8 vols, Paris, 1900–1914,4: 598–641. After only 53 painters had takenpart in the Salon of 1789, the last in whichaccess was restricted to academicians, the firstopen Salon of 1791 displayed works by no fewerthan 172 painters putting their works ondisplay, and by 1793, their number climbed

5.17 Jacques-Joseph Degault, Marie-Therese-

Charlotte, Daughter of Louis XVI, 1795. Miniature

on ivory, diameter 6 cm. New York: The

Metropolitan Museum of Art.



again to 258; Udolpho van de Sandt, ‘Institu-tions et concours’, in Philippe Bordes and RegisMichel, eds, Aux armes et aux arts! Les arts de laRevolution, 1789–1799, Paris, 1988, 141.

3 William Olander, ‘ ‘‘Pour transmettre a laposterite’’: French Painting and Revolution,1774–1795’, PhD diss., New York University,1983, 262; Jean-Francois Heim, Claire Beraudand Philippe Heim, Les Salons de peinture de laRevolution francaise, 1789–1799, Paris, 1989, 45–9.

4 Michel Vovelle, La Revolution francaise. Images etrecit, 1789–1799, 6 vols, Paris, 1989, 1:22 (‘L’imagetemoin’). Nearly all scholarly research on the‘popular’ imagery of the French Revolution hasbeen devoted to widely disseminated printsand to public festivals. See Klaus Herding andRolf Reichardt, Die Bildpublizistik der Franzos-ischen Revolution, Frankfurt, 1989; Antoine deBaecque, La caricature revolutionnaire, Paris,1988; Claude Langlois, La caricature contre-revolutionnaire, Paris, 1988; Mona Ozouf, La feterevolutionnaire, 1789–1799, Paris, 1976.

5 See Erich Hinkel, Der Maler Johann Jakob Hauer,Gau-Algesheim, 1987 (Schriften der Carl-Brilmayer-Gesellschaft, 20); Remi Porcher, ‘Le peintre deCharlotte Corday’, Revue du Loir-et-Cher, 14:161,May 1901, 97–107 (and continuations).

6 Annie Jourdan, ‘Politique artistique et Revolu-tion francaise (1789–1800): La regeneration desarts, un echec?’, Annales historiques de la Revol-ution francaise, 1997, 401–421.

7 Le Courrier francais, 11 October 1795, cited afterUdolpho van de Sandt, ‘La frequentation desSalons sous l’Ancien Regime, la Revolution etl’Empire’, Revue de l’art, 73, 1986, 46. Or, asOlander observed: ‘It is the Salon of the Revo-lution, and if it has something of the characterof a proto-Salon des Refuses, this is only as itshould be, since the majority of artists exhi-biting was, prior to 1789, refuse in spirit if notin fact’ (Olander, ‘Pour transmettre a la posterite’,262).

8 ‘Le genie, et nous le disons crument, presquetoujours le veritable genie est sans-culotte.’Proces-verbaux du Comite d’instruction publique dela Convention, 8 August 1793, cited by CauletteCaubisens-Lasfargues, ‘Le Salon de peinturependant la Revolution’, Annales historiques de laRevolution francaise, 33, 1961, 200.

9 The most noteworthy political piece in theSalon of 1793 (no. 125) was by the non-academic battle painter Jacques Bertaux,whose Tableau representant la Journee du 10 Aout1792 (Musee national du chateau de Versailles)had been commissioned by the NationalConvention. The same subject was presented byan unidentified artist named Desfonts, whose‘Siege des Tuileries par les braves sans-culottes’ (no.595) suggests a politically more straightfor-ward presentation than Bertaux’s confusedskirmish. The engraver Antoine-FrancoisSergent, who exhibited an allegory on Le Pele-

tier, Marat and the ‘martyrs’ of 10 August 1792(no. 457) as well as a ‘Costume Republicain (deSans-culotte)’ (no. 798), was a leading Jacobinfrom Hauer’s own section (see David LloydDowd, ‘Jacobinism and the Fine Arts: TheRevolutionary Careers of Bouquier, Sergentand David’, Art Quarterly, 16:3, 1953, 198–204).

10 Albert Soboul, Les sans-culottes parisiens en l’an II.Mouvement populaire et gouvernement revolution-naire 2 juin 1793–9 thermidor an II, Paris, 1958. Fora summary of the debates between ‘orthodox’and ‘revisionist’ camps, see Michel Vovelle,‘Reflections on the Revisionist Interpretation ofthe French Revolution’, French Historical Studies,61, 1990, 749–55.

11 Richard Mowery Andrews, ‘Social Structures,Political Elites and Ideology in RevolutionaryParis, 1792–94: A Critical Evaluation of AlbertSoboul’s ‘‘Les sans-culottes parisiens en l’anII’’’, Journal of Social History, 19, 1986–87, 71–112.

12 Albert Soboul and Raymonde Monnier, Reper-toire du personnel sectionnaire parisien en l’an II,Paris, 1985, 457.

13 See Richard Cobb, The Police and the People. FrenchPopular Protest 1789–1820, Oxford, 1970, 61–70.

14 Petition a la Convention Nationale par la Societepopulaire des gardes francais, 26 November 1793,Archives nationales, Paris, cited in Olander,‘Pour transmettre a la posterite’, 252. The cultof revolutionary martyrs led to a virtualomnipresence of these plaster casts well intothe National Convention; Soboul, Sans-culottes,299–310.

15 Karl & Faber sale, Munich (26 to 29 May 1978),lot 654, pl. 42 (signed and dated 1776, notidentified as a copy). Admitting the possibilityof a misreading of the signature, it seemspossible that this is a work by Jean-ThomasHauer, a German engraver inscribed at theAcademie Royale between 1769 and 1777.Without being aware of this painting, ErichHinkel tried to identify this student with Jean-Jacques Hauer, but the young artist inscribed atthe Royal Academy was Jean-Thomas Hauer (norelation), who correctly gave 1748 as his date ofbirth and Augsburg, where he had received hisinitial training, as his place of origin (Hinkel,Johann Jakob Hauer, 8).

16 Georges Duval, Souvenirs de la Terreur de 1788 a1793, 4 vols, Paris, 1840–41, 2: 356–7, n. 1.

17 Soboul and Monnier, Repertoire, 457. For thetaxation, based on their annual income, ofmore than 1,100 inhabitants of the district, seeRaymonde Monnier, ‘L’evolution du personnelpolitique de la section de Marat et la rupturede germinal an II’, Annales historiques de la Revol-ution francaise, 1986, 55–6, 73.

18 On Pierre-Alexandre Wille’s career in themilitia, see Johann Georg Wille, Memoirs, ed.Georges Dupleiss, 2 vols, Paris, 1857, 2:210 (18July 1789, first day of service), 2:302 (30 May1791, elected commander of the Cordeliers



batallion), 2:339 (2 April 1792, elected divisioncommander). Division commanders were in

charge of ten battalions, each of these six offi-

cers being second in command to Lafayette.

19 Soboul and Monnier, Repertoire, 457 (no exactdate given). It is not known whether Tiphaine,

created an adjutant sometime in year II

(September 1793 to September 1794), was thedirect successor of Hauer.

20 Katharine Baetjer, European Paintings in the

Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born before

1865: A Summary Catalogue, New York, 1995, 399.

21 See Dale Lothrop Clifford, ‘Can the Uniform

make the Citizen? Paris, 1789–1791’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34, 2001, 363–82; Dale Lothrop

Clifford, ‘The National Guard and the Parisian

Community, 1789–1790’, French HistoricalStudies, 16, 1990, 849–78.

22 Wille, Memoires, 2:217–18 (6 September 1789).

23 Salon of 1791, no. 190; Jean-Marie Bruson and

Christophe Leribault, Peintures du Musee Carna-

valet: Catalogue sommaire, Paris, 1999, 55. Twoyears later an unidentified artist named Coli-

nion exhibited a Portrait d’Homme en Garde-

National (Salon of 1793, no. 704). Louis-LeopoldBoilly’s portrait of a National Guard officer

wearing a somewhat motley uniform, some-

times thought to represent the Duc d’Orleans,might well be the first of these portraits of

National Guardsmen (Lyon: Musee des beaux-

arts); Madeleine Vincent, Musee de Lyon: Lapeinture des XIXe et XXe siecles, Lyon, 1956, 4–5, pl.

xvi.

24 Examples by Boilly representing the Revolu-

tion’s new dignitaries are the portraits ofmembers of the National Assembly, Jean-

Antoine d’Averhoult (dated 1792, Utrecht:

Centraal Museum); Susan L. Siegfried, The Art ofLouis-Leopold Boilly, New Haven and London,

1995, 38–41, and Maximilien Robespierre (c.

1791, Lille: Musee des beaux-arts), see Boilly,1761–1845: Un grand peintre francais de la Revolu-

tion a la Restauration, Lille, 1988–89, 32–33, no.18. Doncre’s portrait of a judge with his family

is at the Vizille Museum; Annick Notter and

Simone Blazy, Dominique Doncre, 1743–1820,Hazebrouck and Arras, 1989, 39–40.

25 Hilarie Faberman and Karen White, The Univer-sity of Michigan Museum of Art: Illustrated Cata-

logue of European and American Painting andSculpture, Ann Arbor, 1988, 100; Philippe Bordes,

‘L’art et le politique’, in Bordes and Michel, Aux

armes et aux arts!, 119–20.

26 Paul L. Grigaut, ‘Three French Works of Amer-

ican Interest’, Art Quarterly, 14:4, 1951, 351–2.

27 Gazette nationale, ou Le Moniteur universel, 5March 1791, 257.

28 See David Andress, Massacre at the Champ deMars: Popular Dissent and Political Culture in theFrench Revolution, Woodbridge and Rochester,2000.

29 Philippe Bordes, ‘Le Mirabeau de Claude-Andre

Deseine: Un concours de sculpture organise

par les Jacobins en 1791’, Revue du Louvre, 26:2,

1976, 61–6. No fewer than four sculptors, Jean-

Antoine Houdon among them, had taken death

masks of Mirabeau on 2 April; within less than

three weeks, all four artists had finished their

busts, staging studio exhibitions and

presenting plaster casts to the National

Assembly.

30 See Roland Recht and Marie-Jeanne Geyer, eds,

A qui ressemblons-nous? Le portrait dans les musees

de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, 1988, 120, no. 83.

31 For an account of this evening in the section de

Marseilles, see Jacques Guilhaumou, La mort de

Marat, Paris, 1989, 27–32.

32 ‘Puisque j’ai encore quelques instants a vivre,

pourrais-je esperer, citoyens, que vous me

permettrez de me faire peindre? [ . . . ] Si vous

daignez faire attention a ma demande, je vous

prie de m’envoyer demain matin un peintre en

miniature’ (15 July 1793, cited in Guilhaumou,

La Mort de Marat, 154).

33 Corday to Barbaroux, 16 July 1793, cited in

Guilhaumou, La Mort de Marat, 149.

34 Two of David’s students, Francois Gerard and

Jean-Baptiste Topino-Lebrun, as well as the

miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Sambat, the

draughtsman Jean-Louis Prieur and the land-

scape painter Claude-Louis Chatelet were

approved jurors by the National Convention, 26

September 1793; James Logan Godfrey, The

Organization, Procedure, and Personnel of the French

Revolutionary Tribunal, Chicago, 1946, 40–1.

35 ‘Pendant qu’on l’interrogeoit, un peintre qu’on

dit etre le citoyen Havre, eleve de David, dessi-

noit sa figure; elle s’en est apercu. Continuez, lui

a-t-elle dit, ne craignait pas que je change de

position.’ Thermometre du jour, 24 July 1793, 192.

36 Despite what Erich Hinkel has written, neither

Jean-Jacques Hauer nor the engraver Jean-

Thomas Hauer, who was inscribed at the

Academie Royale until 1777, appear on any of

the lists of students trained by David, nor could

they have entered the studio of David before

his return from Rome in 1781; see Hinkel,

Johann Jakob Hauer, 8.

37 The engraving by Joseph-Francois Le Roy, after

Brard’s ‘authentic’ likeness when Corday was

on her way to her execution, was announced in

the Journal des affiches et avis divers of 29 August

1793; Marcel Aubert and Marcel Roux, Collection

de Vinck: Inventaire analytique, 8 vols, Paris, 1909–

1968, 3:349, no. 5369. This print was based on

Brard’s pastel in the Musee des beaux-arts,

Caen, see Catherine Gendre, ‘Les metamor-

phoses de Charlotte Corday’, Charlotte Corday:

Une Normande dans la Revolution, Versailles, 1989,

175, no. 42.

38 Prosper Dorbec, ‘Le portrait pendant la Revo-

lution’, Revue de l’art ancien et moderne, 21, 1907,



142. For the portrait presumably engraved afterGarnerey, see below, n. 50.

39 ‘Il a ete admis dans l’intervalle qui separa sonjugement de l’execution. C’est la qu’il aperfectionne le dessin qu’il avait fait a l’audi-ence’. Journal de Perlet, 21 July 1793, cited afterHenri d’Almeras, Charlotte Corday d’apres lesdocuments contemporains, Paris, 1910, 253–4.

40 ‘Elle le fit appeler dans la piece ou on l’avaitfait retirer en attendant l’execution. Elledemanda a voir le portrait, trouve que laressemblance n’etait pas tout-a-fait exacte, etoffrit, pour la terminer, de poser pendant lescourts instants qui lui restaient a vivre.’ Duval,Souvenirs, 2:356–7.

41 Dessins francais XVIIIe et XIXe siecles du MuseeLambinet et de la Bibliotheque municipale deVersailles, Versailles, 1981, 30, no. 23; CharlesVatel, Note sur le portrait de Charlotte Corday par J.-B. [sic] Hauer, Nogent-le-Rotron, 1872, 8. Theidentification does not seem entirely convin-cing, as the drawing appears far too close to theeventual composition to have been taken onthe spot.

42 See Robert Simon, ‘Portrait de martyr: Le Pele-tier de Saint-Fargeau’, in Regis Michel, ed.,David contre David: Actes du colloque organisee aumusee du Louvre du 6 au 10 decembre 1989, 2 vols,Paris, 1993, 1:351–77. For David’s speech, seeDaniel and Guy Wildenstein, Documents comple-mentaires au catalogue de l’œuvre de Louis David,Paris, 1973, 50, no. 427.

43 Lise Andries, ‘Les estampes de Marat sous laRevolution: Une emblematique’, in Jean-ClaudeBonnet, ed., La mort de Marat, Paris, 1986, 187–201.

44 Jacqueline Dauxois, Charlotte Corday, Paris,1988, 217 (‘Bonvallet’). The sculptor, then amember of the Royal Academy as well as anofficial of the municipal administration ofParis, presented his bust to the NationalConvention on 23 July; see Paul Sainte-ClaireDeville, La Commune de l’an II: Vie et mort d’uneassemblee revolutionnaire, Paris, 1946, 113, 362.The morning after the assassination anothersculptor, Claude-Andre Deseine, took a secondmask for his own bust (untraced); Dauxois,Charlotte Corday, 217. All known busts of Marat,mostly plaster casts, have remained unattrib-uted.

45 ‘Ou es-tu David? tu as transmis a la posteritel’image de Lepelletier mourant pour la patrie;il te reste encore un tableau a faire.’ Cited inJorg Traeger, Der Tod des Marat: Revolution desMenschenbildes, Munich, 1986, 213, no. vii.

46 Guilhaumou, La Mort de Marat, 69. On theportraits of Corday, see also Nina RattnerGelbart, ‘The Blonding of Charlotte Corday’,Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38, 2004, 201–221;Helen Weston, ‘The Corday-Marat Affair: NoPlace for a Woman’, in William Vaughan andHelen Weston, eds, Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Marat’,

Cambridge, 2000, 128–52; Michael Marrinan,‘Images and Ideas of Charlotte Corday: Textsand Contexts of an Assassination’, Arts Mag-azine, 54: 8, 1980, 158–76.

47 Cited in d’Almeras, Charlotte Corday, 243–4. For adiscussion of the ‘character smear’ subse-quently distributed, see Marrinan, ‘Images andIdeas’, 160–1.

48 ‘Discours aux manes de Marat et le Pelletier’(29 September 1793), quoted in Timothy J.Clark, ‘Painting in the Year II’, Representations,47, 1994, 17.

49 Collection de Vinck, 3:348, no. 5362. The legend,however, does not name Garnerey.

50 See Collection de Vinck, 3:319, no. 5253. Alixexecuted this engraving after a small oilportrait by Garnerey in the Musee Lambinet,Versailles (Andries, ‘Les estampes de Marat’, pl.8). Even though it would have taken theengraver an unusually long time to publish hisprint, the Garnerey portrait is thought to havebeen painted in Marat’s lifetime.

51 The contract, dated 21 July 1793, is cited inVatel, Note sur le portrait, 5.

52 For further details (like the comparatively highprice of 5 livres for a print), see Marcel Roux,Inventaire du fonds francais: Graveurs du dix-huitieme siecle, 15 vols, Paris, 1930–2004, 1: 170–1, no. 21. On the question of the dress Cordaywore in the afternoon of 13 July 1793, seeLauriane Fallay d’Este in Charlotte Corday,Versailles, 1989, 110–11, no. 115.

53 From a police report of 11 September 1793,quoted in Andries, ‘Les estampes de Marat’,196–7.

54 Soboul, Sans-culottes, 304.

55 Salon of 1793, no. 447. In the first edition of thelivret, a painting by Jacques Sablet was erro-neously listed twice, and the entry under no.447 merely repeated that of Sablet’s no. 252.However, as Hauer only handed in a singlepainting, the inclusion of his name andaddress in the appendix of the first editionleaves no doubt that his Death of Marat was puton display before the livret’s second editioncorrected this mistake. In his monograph onDavid’s painting, Jorg Traeger mentioned theLambinet replica, but curiously overlookedthat Hauer had exhibited his Death on Maratmonths before David finished his martyrportrait (Traeger, Revolution des Menschenbildes,105).

56 Gelbart, ‘The Blonding of Charlotte Corday’,210.

57 La Revolution francaise et l’Europe 1789–1799, 3vols, Paris, 1989, 2: 607–609, no. 809 (text byJeremie Benoit); Marrinan, ‘Images and Ideas’,161. Most other scholars plainly failed torecognize this neutrality.

58 See Olander, ‘Pour transmettre a la posterite’, 470,no. 1468. Messier had been a student of theAcademie Royale in the decade before the



Revolution; he was a member of the Popular

and Republican Society for the Arts and took

part in the Salon in 1796 and 1798. For a study

of the concours, see William Olander, ‘French

Painting and Politics in 1794: The Great

‘‘Concours de l’an II’’’, in Alan Wintermute, ed.,

1789: French Art during the Revolution, New York,

1989, 29–45.

59 Donna M. Hunter, ‘Swordplay: Jacques-Louis

David’s Painting of Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau

on his Deathbed’, in James A.W. Heffernan, ed.,

Representing the French Revolution, Hanover and

London, 1991, 169–91.

60 Explication et jugement motive des tous les ouvrages [

. . . ] exposes au Palais National des Arts, le 10 aout

1793, Paris, 1793, 45–6. The drawing (Salon

of 1793, no. 334) later served as a model for

the engraving commissioned from Pierre-

Alexandre Tardieu and was probably only

then squared for transfer.

61 Hunter, ‘Swordplay’, 170.

62 Salon of 1793, nos 795 and 796. Both paintings

were handed in late, as the first edition of the

livret only listed 627 works of art. Next to

nothing is known about Auguste Sandoz, who

may have been a relation of Louis-David

Sandoz, a militant engraver, printer and print

dealer who died in front of a firing squad on 27

September 1796 after having taken part in the

Champ de Grenelle insurrection (Richard Cobb,

Les Armees revolutionnaires: Instrument de la

Terreur dans les departements, 2 vols, Paris and

The Hague, 1961, 1:155, 2:882–3).

63 Traeger gave them both to Hauer without

discussing his attribution in 1986 (Traeger,

Revolution des Menschenbildes, 145; followed by

Hinkel, Johann Jakob Hauer, 22). In 1983, an

attribution to Fulcran-Jean Harriet was

suggested in Pascal de la Vaissiere, ‘Un adoles-

cent malleable, durci par la Revolution: Le

peintre Fulcran-Jean Harriet’, Gazette des Beaux-

Arts, 101:4, 1983, 144. This was confirmed by

Catherine Gendre in 1989; see Gendre, ‘Les

Metamorphoses de Charlotte Corday’, 153.

Given the paintings’ poor quality, attribution

to the academically trained Harriet, a student

of David, seems implausible, and both paint-

ings were left without an attribution in Bruson

and Leribault, Peintures du Musee Carnavalet,

440–1.

64 Gazette nationale, ou le Moniteur universel, 13

September 1793: ‘La scelerate Charlotte Corday

[ . . . ] dessinee d’apres nature par F. Bonneville,

de la plus grande ressemblance’, cited in

Inventaire du fonds francais, 1:202, no. 97. For

Bonneville’s print derived from Tassaert and

Hauer, see 1:202, no. 98.

65 See Collection de Vinck, 3:352, no. 5382 (Corday);

Inventaire du fonds francais, 1:201, no. 93 (Marat,

re-issued with a new legend after the assas-

sination).

66 For the iconography of both pendants, seeBernard de Montgolfier, ‘Collections revolu-tionnaires’, Bulletin du Musee Carnavalet, 21: 1-2,1968, 31–2..

67 T.J. Clark is definitely right in stressing thecontexts in which David’s martyr portraitswere put on show, but the Salon’s simulta-neous domination by minor artists simplyfailed to attract his attention (see Clark,‘Painting in the Year II’, 15–16). It should alsobe mentioned that plaster casts of themartyrs’ busts – productions hardly revolu-tionary in themselves – were present in theLouvre courtyard as well as in the NationalConvention.

68 See Florence Devenne, ‘La Garde Nationale:Creation et evolution, 1789–aout 1792’, Annaleshistoriques de la Revolution francaise, 1991, 49–65;Raymonde Monnier, ‘La garde citoyenne,element de la democratie parisienne’, inMichel Vovelle, ed., Paris et la Revolution. Actes duColloque de Paris I, 14–16 avril 1989, Paris, 1989,149–52.

69 Eugene Deprez, Les volontaires nationaux (1791–1793), Paris, 1908, 483 (‘7e bataillon dit duTheatre-Francais’, formed 20 September 1792).

70 Monnier, ‘L’evolution du personnel politique’,61–2.

71 One of them, the engraver Francois-Denis Nee,was elected president of the Comite revolu-tionnaire on 1 April 1794 but lost his positionbarely two months later, when the NationalConvention turned against sectionary ‘ultra-revolutionaries’ who seemed to defy the Robes-pierrist regime; Soboul and Monnier, Repertoire,459–60. Among the new personnel installed inHauer’s section on 5 July 1794 another artist isto be found, the engraver Jean-Marie Mixelle;see Monnier, ‘L’evolution du personnel poli-tique’, 66, n. 50; Soboul and Monnier, Reper-toire, 459.

72 Bronislaw Baczko, Comment sortir de la Terreur.Thermidor et la Revolution, Paris, 1989, 84–92;Robert R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled. The Year ofTerror in the French Revolution, Princeton, 1941,361–87.

73 For artists in the Robespierrist Commune ofParis, see Dowd, ‘The French Revolution andthe Painters’, 140–1; Deville, La Commune de l’anII, 340–1, 363–78.

74 Raymonde Monnier, ‘De l’an III a l’an IX, lesderniers sans-culottes. Resistance et repressiona Paris sous le Directoire et au debut duConsulat’, Annales historiques de la Revolutionfrancaise, 56, 1984, 386–406; Kare D. T�nnesson,La defaite des sans-culottes. Mouvement populaire etreaction bourgeoise en l’an III, Oslo and Paris, 1959,333–42.

75 Cited in Soboul and Monnier, Repertoire, 459.

76 See Soboul and Monnier, Repertoire, 457. WhenJean Duplessi-Bertaux was arrested in March1794, just to cite the example of an artist who



had, like Hauer, served as an adjutant-in-

second of a National Guard battalion the year

before, this engraver was denounced for having

been a fervent partisan of Lafayette (Cobb, Les

armees revolutionnaires, 1:116, 2:819 [as

‘Berthaud’ and ‘Bertaux’ respectively]). Hauer

had certainly been precisely that, but as

Lafayette had defected, Duplessi-Bertaux,

becoming adjudant-general of one of the three

brigades of the haphazard armee revolutionnaire

parisien formed in October 1793, undoubtedly

displayed far greater revolutionary zeal than

Hauer.

77 Salon of 1795, no. 241: ‘On y fabrique des canons

de fusil et les ouvriers y chantent des airs patrio-

tiques.’ (‘Gun-barrels are being fabricated

here, and the workmen are singing patriotic

tunes.’)

78 Salon of 1795, no. 242: ‘L’on voit le depart d’un

Dragon. Son pere lui montre la charrue qu’il va

conduire, pour procurer des substances a nos

deffenseurs, tandis que son fils va combattre

l’ennemi.’ (‘Here one sees the departure of a

dragoon. His father shows him the plough he is

going to till in order to procure food for our

defenders, while his son is going to fight the

enemy.’)

79 Salon of 1793, no. 103: ‘Le depart pour les fron-

tieres’ (untraced); Olander,‘Pour transmettre a la

posterite’, 275. One more painter of non-

academic background, Jean-Baptiste Mallet,

had exhibited a similar subject in the same

Salon (no. 35: ‘Le depart d’un Volontaire ou Sacri-

fice a la Patrie’).

80 Alan Forrest, The Soldiers of the French Revolution,

Durham and London, 1990, 81–2. The heavy

recruitment of the year VII (1798–99) brought a

re-emergence of similar images.

81 Gelbart, ‘The Blonding of Charlotte Corday’,

219, n. 32.

82 La famille royale a Paris. De l’histoire a la legende,

Paris, 1993, 163, no. 20. There is a larger,

undated version, in a private collection, La

famille royale a Paris, 163, no. 19. On the royal

imagery after 1793, see Claude Langlois, Les sept

morts du roi, Paris, 1993, 6–33; Linda Lapointe

and Marie-Claude Mirandette, ‘Le sentimenta-

lisme contre-revolutionnaire dans l’icono-

graphie de la Revolution francaise’, in

Iconographie et image de la Revolution francaise.

Actes du colloque tenu dans le cadre du 57e congres

de l’ACFAS les 15 et 16 mai 1989, Montreal, 1990,

161–80.

83 The Irish priest was the confessor of the king’s

sister Elisabeth; his account of the last

moments of Louis XVI had a considerable influ-

ence on the royalist imagery once it was

published in England after his escape from

France in 1794. See Valerie Rousseau-Lagarde

and Daniel Arasse, La guillotine dans la Revolu-

tion, Vizille, 1987, 54.

84 William L. Pressly, The French Revolution as Blas-phemy: Johan Zoffany’s Paintings of the Massacre atParis, August 10, 1792, Berkeley, 1999, 43–7. AnEnglish engraver, Isaac Cruikshank, rapidlyproduced an etching of The Martyrdom of LouisXVI, focusing on the king’s figure before hemounted the guillotine and published as earlyas 1 February 1793 (Collection Vinck, 3: 282–3, no.5155. On English images of the French Revolu-tion, see David Bindman, The Shadow of theGuillotine: Britain and the French Revolution,London, 1989.

85 Quoted from Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Souvenirs[first published 1835–37], 2 vols, Paris, 1986,2:11 (she abandoned her project).

86 From a police report dated 18 March 1793, citedafter Andre Blum, La caricature revolutionnaire(1789–1795), Paris, 1916, 20.

87 Henri Calvet, Le Comite de salut public du depar-tement de Paris (8 juin 1793–21 messidor an II): Uninstrument de la Terreur a Paris, Paris, 1941, 345–9.Confiscated prints were burned and platesdestroyed. It should probably be mentionedthat there were two former students of Vienamong the ‘commissaires’ of this policecommittee censuring counter-revolutionaryimagery: the history painter Philippe Chery,who had already taken part in the taking of theBastille in 1789, and Claude-Louis Chatelet, alandscape painter later guillotined for havingadditionally served on the RevolutionaryTribunal. Jacques-Charles Lecrivain, usuallyconsidered the third artist on the committee,was a decorative painter (see Cobb, The Policeand the People, 358).

88 See Lapointe and Mirandette, ‘Le sentimenta-lisme contre-revolutionnaire’, 168–70, fig. 8.‘L’empressement du public a se procurer leTestament est extreme’, the Annales de laRepublique already noted on 29 January 1793,‘on a fait deja plusieurs editions que sonttoutes epuisees.’ (170, n. 12) The testament assuch was published on the instigation of themunicipal authorities of Paris themselves, whohad grossly underestimated the degree towhich this text would arouse royalist senti-ments; Evelyne Lever, ‘Le Testament de Louis XVI

et la propagande royaliste par l’image pendantla Revolution et l’Empire’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts,94:11, 1979, 159–73.

89 The younger Joseph-Marie Vien’s portrait of theDauphin was painted after June 1793 (Paris:Musee Carnavalet), when the elder Vien and hisson had accompanied a doctor, HippolytePipelet, on his visit to the sick boy in theTemple (Thomas W. Gaehtgens and JacquesLugand, Joseph-Marie Vien: Peintre du roi, Paris,1988, 43). Alexandre Kucharski, a minorportraitist attached to the household of Marie-Antoinette, is known to have made a number ofvisits to the imprisoned queen betweenJanuary and April 1793, but his claim to havepainted a small portrait of the queen in the



Temple, which he repeatedly reproduced later,is far from convincing, as this is clearly derivedfrom an earlier portrait (Xavier Salmon, Museenational du chateau de Versailles: Les pastels, Paris,1997, 93–4, fig. 6).

90 See Calvet, Le Comite de salut public du departe-ment de Paris, 235 (Jacques Girouard, sentencedto death), 356 (Thomas-Bernardin Collard,same outcome).

91 Michel Webert, who ran a print shop in theformer Palais Royal, was arrested in February1794, denounced as ‘un etre immoral et anti-patriote’, and sentenced to death. Publishingand dealing with royalist imagery and counter-revolutionary caricatures seems to have beenthe prime motive for his conviction (seeLanglois, La caricature contre-revolutionnaire, 225;Calvet, Le Comite de salut public du departement deParis, 346, 356).

92 See Lapointe and Mirandette, ‘Le sentimenta-lisme contre-revolutionnaire’, 173, fig. 9;Collection de Vinck, 3:251, no. 5063. On this printand its publisher, see Claude Langlois, ‘Propa-gande royaliste et censure apres Thermidor: Ledossier Bouillon-Verite (1794–1814)’, in Saint-Denis ou le jugement dernier des rois. Actes ducolloque organisee par l’Universite Paris VIII, l’Institutd’histoire de la Revolution francaise et le Comite duBicentenaire de la Revolution a Saint-Denis du 2 au 4fevrier 1789, Saint-Denis, 1993, 163–71. Thoughsometimes called an emigre artist, CharlesBenazech was an English-born painter ofFrench descent; he had spent some time in thestudio of Greuze in Paris before returning toLondon in 1789.

93 On Hauer’s painting, see Jacques Wilhelm,‘Deux peintures de Jean-Jacques Hauer, don deMadame la baronne Elie de Rothschild’, Bulletindu Musee Carnavalet, 14:2, 1961, 2–5.

94 Both replicas were exhibited in 1994; La familleroyale a Paris, 163, no. 17, fig. 159 (privatecollection, undated), no. 18 (Versailles: MuseeLambinet, dated 1795).

95 See Wilhelm, ‘Deux peintures de Jean-JacquesHauer’, 4, fig. 3; Collection de Vinck, 3:267, no.5110 (signed, but not dated).

96 Collection de Vinck, 3:271, no. 5122 (published 10March 1794).

97 Langlois, Les sept morts du roi, 30. PierreBouillon, born in 1776, was then a student ofthe history painter Nicolas-Andre Monsiau,winning the Prix de Rome in 1797.

98 Langlois, Les sept morts du roi, 15. This isprecisely why it is nearly impossible to separate‘royalist sentimentalism’ (Lapointe andMirandette, ‘Le sentimentalisme contre-revo-lutionnaire’, 162) from downright ‘royalistpropanda’ (Lever, ‘Le Testament de Louis XVI’,159).

99 See Wilhelm, ‘Deux peintures de Jean-JacquesHauer’, 5, fig. 2. It is impossible to tell whetherHauer’s painting preceded the Dauphin’s

decease or marked an effort to benefit from theattention newly focusing on the fate of theroyal family.

100 Langlois, Les sept morts du roi, 9–11. In 1801Verite was able to add two more subjects to theseries, but a complete re-issue of the entire setwas published only after the return of theBourbons in 1814.

101 See Wilhelm, ‘Deux peintures de Jean-JacquesHauer’, 4–5.

102 Duval, Souvenirs, 2:378–80. On duty with adetachment from the battalion of the Fontainede Grenelle section, Duval met at least oneother painter in the prison of the royal family,Claude-Louis Chatelet, then acting as a‘commissaire’ of the municipal gouvernment(see n. 87, above).

103 Cited after Raymonde Monnier, ‘Les tamboursde Santerre: Le general, la legende et l’histoire’,in Saint-Denis ou le jugement dernier des rois, 200.

104 Collection de Vinck, 3:294, no. 5188.

105 Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France. Theprint was prudently withdrawn after Ther-midor, see Van de Sandt, ‘Institutions etconcours’, 151, fig. 135; Olander, ‘Pour trans-mettre a la posterite’, 470, no. 1451 (erroneouslylisted as ‘La journee du 20 juin’). A well-knownengraving by Villeneuve, published in Parisshortly after the execution, went even furtherby radically focusing on a close-up of the blood-dripping head and the hand holding it; Laguillotine dans la Revolution, 51, no. 46.

106 Both the draughtsman and his engraver typi-cally hid behind pseudonyms, and were delib-erately evasive about the location of the print’scommercial outlet ‘A Paris chez les Marchandsdes Nouveautes’. See Collection de Vinck, 3: 294–5, no. 5190 (and subsequent copies).

107 The Calm And Collected Behaviour of Lewis theSixteenth on Parting From His Confessor Edgeworth,engraved by Luigi Schiavonetti, see Collection deVinck, 3:279, no. 5144. Benazech’s oil painting isin the Musee national du chateau de Versailles;see La famille royale a Paris, 162, no. 4, fig. 152.

108 As claimed in Jourdan, ‘Les artistes en revolu-tion’, 162–3.

109 Vincent eventually was awarded the first prizefor his glorification of republican heroism inthe civil war (‘La citoyenne de St. Milhier’), seeOlander, ‘Pour transmettre a la posterite’, 468, no.1421. As a member of the Jacobin Club since1790 he is listed in Francois-Albert Aulard, LaSociete des Jacobins: Recueil de documents pourl’histoire du Club des Jacobins de Paris, 6 vols, Paris,1889–97, 1: lxxvi). On the removal of Vincentfrom the museum commission, see AndrewMcClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, andthe Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris, Cambridge, 1994, 104. For thecitation on Suvee, see Wildenstein, Documentscomplementaires, 47, no. 400 (from a letter dated24 December 1792); on his arrest on 2 June



1794, see Jules Guiffrey, ‘Joseph-Benoıt Suvee.

Correspondance inedite’, Archives de l’art fran-

cais, 4, 1910, 291–2. Suvee had submitted a

‘Devouement des femmes francaises’ which won

him a second prize after Thermidor; Olander,

‘Pour transmettre a la posterite’, 469, no. 1441.

110 A Catalogue of very valuable French Prints of theXVIIIth Century, London, 1974, 97, no. 305.Nothing indicates that Sergent changed hispolitical views. Having returned to Paris in1796, he was again proscribed as a radical

under the Consulate in 1801 and fled to Italy;Dowd, ‘Jacobinism and the Fine Arts’, 211.

111 See Graham Reynolds and Katharine Baetjer,European Miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum ofArt, New York, 1994, 104, no. 74.

112 Soboul and Monnier, Repertoire, 105. When hisson, the painter Jean-Marie Degault, hadjoined his father in prison in May 1795, thepolice were considering him a ‘jacobin du9 thermidor, agent de la tyrannie et de sonpere’.



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