The "French" Art of the Comeback, Pt. III: David in the French Revolution
Florida Man explores Jacques-Louis David's political departure from the monarchy in favor of the republican French Revolution
Introduction
I am continuing my series “The ‘French’ Art of the Comeback”. This is a sub-series of my larger series “The Art of the Comeback”, in which I rank and analyze the top ten political comebacks in the history of global democracy. I got through my bottom four rankings:
#7: Donald Trump (President of the UNITED STATES)
#8: Benjamin Netanyahu (Prime Minister of ISRAEL)
#9: Lula de Silva (President of BRAZIL)
#10: Mahathir Mohamad (Prime Minister of MALAYSIA)
The sixth spot will be Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau of France. Eventually, I will also rank French President Charles de Gaulle. French leaders taking up two slots on my list led me to realize that France exemplifies the Art of the Comeback more than any other country in modern history. I began writing my article about Clemenceau, but I realized that I wanted to provide historical context because of France’s turbulent history and the leaders who crafted that history.
On May 16, I released my first installment of my series “The ‘French’ Art of the Comeback”. It was titled “Florida Man’s Love Letter to France”. In it, I explored political leaders of France, particularly: Napoleon Bonaparte, Talleyrand, and King Louis XVIII (as a representative of the entire House of Bourbon).
Before I got to Clemenceau, I wanted to also focus on French artists with major comebacks. In French history, the art is so intertwined with the politics that the painters deserve just as much focus as the political leaders. David really serves as an artistic analog to Talleyrand in that they both had allegiances to multiple regimes during the chaos in France in the late 18th century and early 19th century. Consequently, I am writing three articles about David. On May 24, I already released one on his early career as a painter for King Louis XVI’s royal court. You can read that one here. This article constitutes the second one out of the three. In this article, I will explore David’s significance in the French Revolution. The final installment will explore his work with Emperor Napoleon I.
Abandonment of the Monarchy for the Revolution
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of David’s career is that Louis XVI’s monarchy commissioned The Oath of the Horatii, one of David’s most iconic works. (The image above displays this piece.) Why is this ironic? Louis XVI's monarchy wanted David to create a Neoclassical painting about Roman civil service as an allegory for loyalty to the French nation. Louis XVI wanted to engender more loyalty from the French citizenry, but revolutionaries ultimately saw the piece as a call to arms. They saw themselves in the Horatii triplets. They wanted to take up arms to overthrow the abusive French monarchy.
As many French political figures have done, David went with whichever political movement had the most power at that particular moment. For that reason, in 1789, he abandoned his role as painter for Louis XVI’s royal court. Instead, he saw the momentum with the French Revolution. He joined forces with Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobin Club. This pivot from David demonstrates the French Art of the Comeback. David continued to reinvent himself. At a certain point, David realized that the monarchy would likely fall to the French Revolution. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!
The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789)
Although Jacques-Louis David changed his political allegiances during the onset of the French Revolution, his artistic style did not change much. He still employed the French Neoclassical style. He was just appropriating it for different ends. The above image shows David’s first prominent work as a revolutionary artist: The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons. David painted it in 1789, the first year of the French Revolution.
Just as David did with The Oath of the Horatii, this 1789 painting also depicts an event in Roman history. The 1784 painting The Oath of the Horatii depicts the Horatii triplet brothers pledging an oath to protect Rome against a rival family in the Curiatii triplets in enemy Etruria. The 1789 painting depicts what its title suggests. Brutus overthrew the Roman monarchy in 509 BC and helped to found the Roman Republic. The painting depicts Brutus seeing the return of his sons executed for conspiring to re-establish the Roman monarchy.
This Roman monarchy came five centuries before the more notable Roman Empire. Even though both paintings depict Roman history, they depict different periods. The 1789 painting depicts an event approximately 150 years after the event depicted in The Oath of Horatii, which took place during the Roman monarchy before the establishment of the Republic.
In the 1789 painting, Brutus was the one who called for the execution of his sons. Just as The Oath of the Horatii did, Brutus embodies full civic virtue, even at the cost of one’s own family. While Brutus’s wife and daughters are crying at the sight of the dead boys, Brutus remains emotionless, embodying Stoicism. Despite the common exemplification of civic virtue, each painting is honoring a different virtue. The Horatii triplets were defending a monarchy while Brutus is defending republicanism, the ultimate goal of the French revolutionaries after the fall of King Louis XVI.
From a formal perspective, Jacques-Louis David employs the same Neoclassical styles in both paintings. We see similar use of Greco-Roman architecture, specifically, with the Doric columns in the background. We have intense chiaroscuro and drapery of saturated colors. Despite the maintaining of the visual styles, Jacques-Louis David was drastically changing the message and goal of his art during the French Revolution.
The Death of Marat (1793)
Jacobin vs. Girondin
The French monarchy did not end until September 1792, when the French National Convention — a unicameral legislative body — started to govern France. The country now had its republic. David no longer just served as an artist to those in power. He rose to actual political power. He was elected to the National Convention and, in January 1793, voted in favor of executing the recently deposed Louis XVI. Jacques-Louis David closely allied with Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins. David essentially became the chief propagandist and cultural minister for the new revolutionary, republican government in France. No longer was a cultural minister commissioning David to paint. David was now calling the shots for the government.
Amid the height of his power, Jacques-Louis David would eventually paint The Death of Marat, another one of David’s three most notable paintings alongside The Oath of Horatii and Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Jean-Paul Marat was a Jacobin leader in the National Convention, and Charlotte Corday — a 25-year-old Girondin woman — assassinated him in his bathtub. The Girondin were the more moderate faction in the French Revolution. They rivaled the Jacobin. They mostly came from the more rural parts of France outside Paris. They had more sympathy to royalty and French society before the Revolution. To give some examples, the Girondin disagreed with the Jacobins on the following issues. The disagreements are definitely not limited to this list.
The Girondin strongly disagreed with Robespierre’s escalating executions during the Reign of Terror.
The Girondin wanted a trial for Louis XVI instead of an execution. They also proposed an exile of Louis XVI instead of an execution.
The Girondin wanted a more federalist approach to France with more regional autonomy as opposed to the centralized nature of the French Republic.
The Girondin had more free-market stances on economic issues as opposed to the Jacobins’ price ceilings and welfare to the poor.
The Atheists’ Appropriation of Catholic Practices
The Jacobins martyrized Marat, and David communicated that sentiment in his painting The Death of Marat, created just a few weeks after Marat’s assassination. Most Jacobins had renounced any idea of a Christian god. Some were atheist. Robespierre was deist. Three months after Marat’s death, the National Convention would establish the Cult of Reason as France’s official religion except that it was atheistic.
Despite their rejection of the traditional Catholic faith of France for centuries, the Jacobins appropriated much of the traditions of Catholicism to ease the French people into state-enforced atheism. Part of the strategy with replacing one religion with a new one is to adopt and modify some practices of the old one. The National Convention adopted the new French Republican calendar. Instead of having a day dedicated to the feast of a Catholic saint, the Republican calendar dedicated each day to a crop (e.g. a grape), a farm animal (e.g., a horse), or a farming implement (e.g., a wine press). As of the day that I am writing this paragraph, June 3, if we were using the French Republican calendar, it would be 15 Prairial. Today is the day of the quail. Obviously, this calendar deviated from a calendar that revolved around Catholicism, but it shared the idea of dedicating each day to something specific.
Similarly, instead of destroying French Gothic cathedrals, the Jacobins converted them into Temples of Reason, the places of worship for the Cult of Reason. Of course, they defaced any Christian iconography, but the architecture stayed the same. They wanted to the ornate trappings of Catholicism in France. For example, in Notre Dame in Paris, they replaced any images of the Virgin Mary with female personifications of Liberty and Reason. Just as Catholicism did, the Cult of Reason would make dedication to a woman except that Liberty and Reason were not specific women as the Virgin Mary was. The Jacobin also added busts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean-Paul Marat as opposed to dedications to other saints.
Yes, the Jacobins were essentially martyrizing Marat. The term “martyr” in the traditional sense refers to someone killed for practicing Christianity (usually Catholicism), but this term has obviously broadened in scope in modern history. Instead of dying for a religious cause, Jean-Paul Marat died for a political philosophy, tantamount to religion in revolutionary France in the 1790s. In fact, political philosophy supplanted religion.
Just as David continued the artistic conventions of French Neoclassicism in his painting during the French Revolution, he would implement older Christian conventions in his atheist, revolutionary art. The 1793 painting The Death of Marat exemplifies David appropriating Christian artistic conventions in an atheistic piece of the French Revolution. The dead Marat’s sloped posture with his eyes closed evokes the depictions of the dead Christ in Christian artwork.
We most specifically see this in depictions of the Lamentation, a specific scene in depiction of the Passion of the Christ. The image above shows one of the most famous depictions of the Lamentation from Giotto di Bondone’s Proto-Renaissance frescoes in the Arena Chapel — located in Padua, Italy. In this scene, many people are mourning the dead Christ after they have taken him down from the cross post-crucifixion. These people include figures, such as: Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John the Apostle.
David copies this way that painters would depict the dead Christ, the ultimate Christian martyr. He then applies it to depicting Marat, who would become the equivalent of Christ in the Cult of Reason. For that reason, the French revolutionaries installed busts of him in Notre Dame.
The Festival of the Supreme Being
During his time as the de facto chief propagandist and art minister for Maximilien Robespierre, Jacques-Louis David was not just producing paintings, his typical medium. David was also staging events. He was channeling Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the Italian Baroque sculptor with a history of stage production in theater. David knew that art was not just visual. It had to become performative. David made Marat’s funeral into just as much of an artistic event as David’s painting of Marat.
David reached his religious appropriation zenith when he directed and designed the Festival of the Supreme Being, which took place in June 1794. The Festival of the Supreme Being served as a public launch of Robespierre’s new state religion for France: the Cult of the Supreme Being. Robespierre had defenestrated the old state religion of the Cult of Reason. Robespierre objected to it because he did not agree with having an atheistic state religion. He followed the theological school of thought of deism. In other words, he believed that a god created the universe, but he did not intervene in the current state of the universe in the way that the Abrahamic God in the Bible has done. Enlightenment deists often referred to god as a watchmaker who created the universe and wound it up. He then let the universe run on its own.
Robespierre enlisted David, as the de facto artistic minister of revolutionary France, to design this celebration of the Supreme Being. At this point, Robespierre was really at the height of his power, but he would soon fly too close to the sun as Icarus did. The image above shows an artist’s rendition of the Festival of the Supreme Being. David and Robespierre chose to hold the event in Champ de Mars, a central green space in Paris.
A towering papier-machê mountain served as the focal point of the festival. David adorned it with greenery and flowers. Atop the mountain, he planted a tree called the “Tree of Liberty”. The tree symbolized the rebirth and growth of the new France recently liberated from a tyrannical monarchy. The use of a “tree of liberty” evoked a famous statement that Thomas Jefferson made in 1787. After Shay’s Rebellion, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.
I do not know if Jefferson directly inspired David and Robespierre with the idea for the Tree of Liberty although the Enlightenment figures from America inspired much of the French Revolution with their own American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine specifically inspired the French as they all spent time in France throughout their political careers. Jefferson’s quote definitely prefigured what would happen in France. He made the statement two years before the onset of the French Revolution and six years before the execution of King Louis XVI.
The orchestration of this festival by David showed that, as an artistic minister for the National Convention, he wanted to go beyond his typical medium of painting. As I have already written, Jacques-Louis David knew that propaganda had to become performative. It couldn’t just be some oil paint on a canvas. David used the material of papier-machê because he saw meaning in its ephemerality.
It could serve its purpose as the material for the mountain in the festival, but it could also be burned. Both the imagery of a mountain burning and the use of flowers very much mirror the final sequence in Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar when the cult kills its festival’s sacrifices by burning them in a wooden, triangular house. The triangular shape of the house evokes mountains, which dominated the landscape of the cult’s village in rural Sweden. Of course, the French people in 1794 did not know what the film Midsommar was, but — without the advent of the camera — we do not have much to visualize the imagery of the Festival of the Supreme Being. In my mind, I imagine Midsommar.
Even though Robespierre was purportedly dedicating this festival to the Supreme Being — the anonymous, faceless god of Robespierre’s new official deistic state religion — he made himself the center of the festival. He led the parade up the mountain. The parade included floats with allegorical statues and effigies atop them. The personification of Wisdom had a statue while vices (such as ambition and egoism) had effigies, which they would burn at the festival. The idea of burning an effigy appears in Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar alongside the film from which Midsommar drew much inspiration: Robin Hardy’s 1973 film The Wicker Man. By burning these effigies, they were incinerating the vices of the old pre-Revolution world.
For these reasons, the new state religion of France still had the trappings of the purportedly ostentatious Catholicism. Robespierre still wanted the pomp and circumstance. He still wanted performative festivals. He still had the idea of vices. He still used iconography, which Marat would eventually become in the form of a bust in Notre Dame. Maximilien Robespierre was not rejecting Catholicism in the way that Martin Luther did a quarter millennium in Germany before the French Revolution. Instead, Maximilien Robespierre more so mirrored that of Henry VIII when he founded the Church of England.
Martin Luther wanted to get rid of the purported gaudiness and waste of the Catholic Church while Henry VIII and Maximilien Robespierre wanted to keep it. They just wanted to abandon Rome. Of course, Henry VIII and Maximilien Robespierre differed in that Henry VIII still dedicated his church to Jesus Christ while Robespierre eschewed Christ in favor of deism and an anonymous faceless deity in the Supreme Being.
Once the parade ended, Maximilien Robespierre gave a theatrical address to the crowds at the Festival of the Supreme Being, but — even though Robespierre was the front-facing person in the Festival of the Supreme Being — Jacques-Louis David was the one orchestrating it all. Robespierre had the role merely as an actor in a play while David directed it all.
The Thermidorian Downfall of David and Robespierre
Just seven weeks later, in late July 1794, the Themidorian Reaction began in France. The Thermidorian Reaction got its name because it occurred during the French republican month of Thermidor. This month spanned from July 19 or 21 to August 17 or 21. None of the names of the 12 months of the French republican calendar were real names. They were invented names inspired by the weather experienced at that time of the year. The word “Thermidor” comes from the French word thermal, which itself comes from the Greek word thermos or “heat”. Get it? July and August are hot months! These French Revolution guys were really creative!
Even though people still generally supported republicanism and opposed the monarchy, they no longer were tolerating the violent and radical excesses of the Reign of Terror led by Robespierre. The Themidorian Reaction resulted in the guillotining of Robespierre. This fate for Robespierre was obviously poetic justice for the man who popularized the use of the guillotine for the very frequent executions during the Reign of Terror.
Because Maximilien Robespierre fell, Jacques-Louis David had to fall politically too. David was one of the most influential Jacobins as Robespierre’s de facto minister of art although nobody executed David. He was not as central of a figure as Robespierre was. He mainly served as an artist and propagandist behind the scenes, but the people leading the Thermidorian Reaction imprisoned David just days after Robespierre’s execution, which occurred on July 28, 1794. They imprisoned David on August 2.
David served time in prison until December 28. He had goodwill with the French people because the French people still respected him as a great French artist. His career began decades before the French Revolution began, but the people leading the Thermidorian Reaction imprisoned David again on May 29, 1795. They released him for the final time in September 1795.
For the next four years, Jacques-Louis David retreated back to private life in Paris. He withdrew from politics and returned to dedicating his time solely to painting, but painting in solitude as President George W. Bush does in Crawford, Texas, did not appeal to Jacques-Louis David. Painting in solitude does not embody the French Art of the Comeback. Soon, Jacques-Louis David would make another comeback amid the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the next installment in this series, I will explore Jacques-Louis David’s relationship with Napoleon Bonaparte.