The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France

By Richard Taws

In revolutionary France the life of things could not be assured. War, shortage of materials, and frequent changes in political authority meant that few large-scale artworks or permanent monuments to the Revolution’s memory were completed. On the contrary, visual practice in revolutionary France was characterized by the production and circulation of a range of transitional, provisional, ephemeral, and half-made images and objects, from printed paper money, passports, and almanacs to temporary festival installations and relics of the demolished Bastille. Addressing this mass of images conventionally ignored in art history, The Politics of the Provisional contends that they were at the heart of debates on the nature of political authenticity and historical memory during the French Revolution. Thinking about material durability, this book suggests, was one of the key ways in which revolutionaries conceptualized duration, and it was crucial to how they imagined the Revolution’s transformative role in history.

The Politics of the Provisional is the first book in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book will be available in the following e-book editions: Kindle, Nook Study, Google Editions, ebrary, EBSCO, Project MUSE, and JSTOR.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PSUPress
• Release date: Apr 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9780271061894

Book preview

THE POLITICS OF

THE PROVISIONAL

THE POLITICS OF

THE PROVISIONAL

ART AND EPHEMERA IN

REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

RICHARD TAWS

The Pennsylvania State University Press

University Park, Pennsylvania

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taws, Richard, 1977–

The politics of the provisional : art and ephemera in revolutionary France / Richard Taws.

p.         cm.

Summary: Examines how ephemeral images and objects made in 1790s France mediated the memory of the French Revolution and enabled new forms of political subjectivity—Provided by publisher.

Includes bibliographical references (p.      ) and index.

ISBN 978-0-271-05418-6 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Art—Political aspects—France—History—18th century.

2. Art and popular culture—France—History—18th century.

3. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799.

I. Title.

N72.P6T39 2013       701'.03094409033—dc23

2012017708

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in China by Everbest Printing Ltd., through Four Colour Print Group, Louisville, KY Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Additional credits: page i, detail of figure 84; pages ii–iii, detail of figure 60; pages iv–v, detail of figure 45; pages vi–vii, detail of figure 33.

On the tribune the bonnet rouge was painted in gray. The royalists started laughing at this gray bonnet rouge, this false room, this cardboard monument, this papier-mâché sanctuary, this Panthéon of mud and spittle. How quickly it was bound to disappear! The columns were of barrel staves, the vaults were of batten, the bas-reliefs were of cement, the entablatures were of pine, the statues were of plaster, the marbles were painted, the murals were canvas; and in the provisional France made the eternal.

VICTOR HUGO

Quatre-vingt-treize (1874)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Made of Money: Transparent Bodies, Authentic Values, Paper Signs

CHAPTER TWO

Between States: Passports, Certificates, and Citizens

CHAPTER THREE

Revolutionary Models/Model Revolutionaries: Architecture, Print, and Participation at the Festival of the Federation

CHAPTER FOUR

Performing the Bastille: Pierre-François Palloy and the Memory-Work of the Revolution

CHAPTER FIVE

Material Futures: Marking Time in a Revolutionary Almanac

CHAPTER SIX

Paper Traces: Playing Games with the Revolutionary Past

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Illustrations

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1.  Constitution of 1791, damaged by P.-F. Palloy in May 1793

2.  Jacques-Louis David, La mort de Joseph Bara

3.  Letterhead, le directoire du département de la Nièvre à la commission des administrations civiles, police et tribunaux

4.  Jean-Pierre Droz, assignat, twenty-five sols

5.  Billet de vingt sols, municipalité de Laval, département de la Mayenne

6.  Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux, assignat (illuminated from beneath to show La Nation watermark), fifteen sous

7.  O Sacre Dieu—uns bekomm bien die Liberte-Welch ein Wollöben! Es fleust der Milk und die Hönick! Ah ça ira!

8.  Bon de cinquante livres; Dieu et le Roi

9.  Assignat of five francs folded in the manner of the Vendéens and the Chouans to read la mort de la République

10.  L’homme aux assignats

11.  La Bourse protège les agioteurs

12.  Leonard Schenck and Pieter Schenck II, Mr Jean Law

13.  Camus et un acolyte accueillent un couple de rentiers

14.  L’impayable rentier de l’état, que ne suis-je Camus

15.  Ouf!

16.  Jacques-Louis David, Marat assassiné

17.  Adoration des patriotes, à l’aspect d’un gros-sous, dessinée en France d’après nature l’an (sans argent) 3 de la liberté

18.  Le roi mangeant des pieds à la Sainte Menehould, le maitre du poste confronte un assignat et reconnait le roi

19.  L’expirante Targinette

20.  Cas des assignats, chez l’étranger

21.  Passport issued to Louis Baraud

22.  Carle Vernet [inv. del.] and François Godefroy [sculp.], Formulaire du congé absolu

23.  Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux [inv.] and François-Noel Sellier [sculp.], Projet d’un monument pour consacrer la Révolution

24.  Passport issued to Augustin Désiré

25.  Isaac Cruikshank after John Nixon, Le Gourmand

26.  Anatole Devosge after Jacques-Louis David, Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort

27.  Charles-François-Gabriel Levachez [inv. del. medallion] and Jean Duplessi-Bertaux [inv. del. vignette], Honoré, Gabriel, Riquetti, Mirabeau, député de Provence aux États généraux de 1789, mort le 2 avril 1791

28.  Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Jeanbon Saint-André

29.  Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-representative of the Colonies

30.  Passport issued to Anne-Louis Girodet

31.  Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Self-Portrait

32.  Jean Beugnet, Congé absolu, pour passer aux vétérans, délivré à Médart

33.  Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux [inv.] and Pierre-Alexandre Tardieu [sculp.], assignat, four hundred livres

34.  Nicolas [inv.] and Delettre [sculp.], Brevet du vainqueur de la Bastille, décerné en vertu du décret de l’Assemblée Nationale du 19 juin 1790 à Pierre Fillon

35.  Antoine Vestier, Portrait de Latude

36.  Jean-Jacques Hauer, General Lafayette and Mme. Roland Drawing a Plan for the Festival of Federation in 1791

37.  Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, Vue du Champ de Mars le 14 juillet 1790

38.  Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculp.], Fédération générale faite à Paris le 14 juillet 1790

39.  Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculp.], Les troupes du Champ de Mars partant pour la place Louis XV le 12 juillet 1789

40.  Étienne Béricourt, Divertissement pendant les travaux préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération

41.  Les travaux du Champ de Mars, from Almanach de la Fédération de France

42.  Vue des travaux du Champ de Mars par les parisiens, l’an 1er de la liberté le 12 juillet 1790

43.  Hubert Robert, Fête de la Fédération au Champ de Mars

44.  La nation française assistée par M. De Lafayette terrasse le despotisme et les abus du regne feodal qui terrassaient le peuple

45.  Louis Lecoeur after Jacques-François-Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines, Serment fédératif du 14 juillet 1790

46.  La Fédération faite le 14 juillet 1790, almanach pour 1791

47.  Cloquet [del.] and Le François [scripsit.], Vue générale de la Fédération française prise à vôl d’oiseau au-dessus de Chaillot

48.  Meusnier, Plan général du Champ de Mars et du nouveau cirque

49.  Antoine Donchery, Portrait de Pierre-François Palloy

50.  Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Modèle de la Bastille

51.  Certificat d’artiste, et d’ouvrier en bâtiment

52.  Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Stone from the Bastille, with Attached Plan of the Bastille

53.  Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Medal Made from Bastille Remnants

54.  Antoine Cosme Giraud, Le XIV juillet MVCCLXXXX

55.  Vue de la fête donnée sur le plan de la Bastille

56.  Le dégel de la nation

57.  Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, Modèle de la Bastille

58.  Hubert Robert, La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition

59.  Attaque de la petite Bastille

60.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution

61.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Calendrier républicain

62.  Louis Lecoeur, La Constitution française

63.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of upper section)

64.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération

65.  Montagne élevée au champ de la réunion pour la fête de l’Être Suprême le 20 prairial l’an 2eme

66.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of pamphlet seller)

67.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, La croisée

68.  Jean-Germain Drouais, Soldat romain blessé

69.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail showing figures on right-hand side of print)

70.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of marble)

71.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié aux amis de la Constitution (detail of newspaper vendor, version with calendar attached)

72.  Label for Pharmaceutical Goods Sold by L. Chedeville

73.  Philibert-Louis Debucourt, La paix. A Bonaparte pacificateur

74.  J. Benizy dit. Jean Dubuisson [del. sculp.], Valeur des assignats et autres papiers monnaies

75.  François Bonneville, Tableau d’assignats avec portraits de victimes et de profiteurs

76.  A. W. Huffner, Verbrennung der Assignaten in Paris am 19ten Febr. 1796

77.  Les députés de la Gironde condamnés à mort jetant des assignats au peuple qui les déchire

78.  Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault [sculpt.], Statue de Louis XIV abatue

79.  Design for a Circular Tabatière Lid

80.  Villeicht enthüllen sich der Weissen vorsicht woege; auch selbst durch Robespierre

81.  Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Trompe-l’Oeil Table with Playing Cards

82.  Tableau d’une partie des crimes commis pendant la Révolution et particulièrement sous le règne de la Convention nationale

83.  Assignat (illuminated from beneath to show watermark), five hundred livres

84.  François Bonneville, Tableau des assignats (avec cartes à jouer et lunettes)

85.  Bailly conduit Voltaire et autres précurseurs de la Révolution française vers la cité future

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would have remained a provisional object itself were it not for the guidance and support of numerous individuals over many years. I have a lot of people to thank, and wholeheartedly so, although limitations of space prevent me from being as specific as I would like. My first debt is to Helen Weston and Tom Gretton, two remarkable teachers and writers who ignited my interest in the French Revolution, encouraged me to pursue this subject, and offered tremendous insight, inspiration, and assistance along the way. My colleagues at University College London (UCL) have provided a model for critically engaged thought, intellectual exchange, and collegiality. Conversations over many years with David Bindman, Warren Carter, Emma Chambers, T. J. Demos, Diana Dethloff, Natasha Eaton, Mechthild Fend, Briony Fer, Charles Ford, Andrea Fredericksen, Tamar Garb, Nicholas Grindle, Andrew Hemingway, Sarah James, Petra Lange- Berndt, Maria H. Loh, Martin Perks, Rose Marie San Juan, Stephanie Schwartz, Libby Sheldon, Frederic Schwartz, Frances Stracey, and Alison Wright have shaped and continue to shape my thinking on this and numerous other topics. It was a particular honor to be invited to present some of the new material in this book as the 2010 Tomás Harris Lectures at UCL; the feedback I received on those occasions helped me formulate several key aspects of chapters 4 and 5.

I would also like to thank my former colleagues in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, as well as those elsewhere in Montreal, where much of this book was written, in particular Darin Barney, Susan Dalton, Peggy Davis, Dominic Hardy, Cecily Hilsdale, Amelia Jones, Nikola von Merveldt, Tom Mole, Andrew Piper, Hajime Nakatani, Carrie Rentschler, Christine Ross, Jonathan Sterne, Will Straw, and Angela Vanhaelen. Catherine Clinger, Nicholas Dew, Mary Hunter, and Stuart MacMillan provided friendship, fun, food, and discussion and made my time in Canada an absolute pleasure.

For friendship, collaboration, conversation, and advice of various kinds, in various places, and over different periods of time, many thanks are also due to Steven Adams, Emma Barker, John Barrell, Serge Bianchi, Yve-Alain Bois, Juliet Carey, Richard Clay, Nancy W. Collins, Julia Douthwaite, Jane Elliott, Alan Forrest, Amy Freund, Anthony Geraghty, Mark Hallett, Claudette Hould, Ben Kafka, Anne Lafont, Valerie Mainz, Sarah Monks, Satish Padiyar, Magali Philippe, Rolf Reichardt, Emily Richardson, Harriet Riches, Adrian Rifkin, John David Rhodes, Vanessa Schwartz, Matthew Shaw, Susan Siegfried, Christina Smylitopoulos, Rebecca Spang, Tamara Trodd, Sarah Victoria Turner, Dror Wahrman, Sue Walker, Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, Bronwen Wilson, Alan Wintermute, and Beth S. Wright. Lynn Hunt’s work has been an inspiration for many years, and I have valued tremendously her incredibly perceptive and generous responses to my work. Colin Jones, Jann Matlock, Todd Porterfield, Katie Scott, and Richard Wrigley read all or part of the text in its various incarnations. Their guidance and immensely thoughtful comments have been hugely appreciated and have significantly shaped the text that follows. Katherine Crawford and Erika Naginski both read the manuscript in its entirety and offered remarkably engaged and helpful suggestions. Any errors that remain are, of course, entirely my own.

Aspects of this book were presented during the course of its preparation at a diverse range of conferences, symposia, and lectures, and it always came away better as a result—I am grateful to all those who have invited me to present this material and to all the participants and audiences at these events. Many thanks are also due to my students in Montreal and London, on whom I regularly tested parts of this book, for their thoughtful and engaged responses.

I would like to thank the AHRC, Royal Historical Society, Society for the Study of French History, UCL History of Art Department and Graduate School, the Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, and the Faculty of Arts at McGill University for funding my research at various stages. The award of a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Foundation came at a pivotal time, personally and intellectually, and made possible the research and writing of a significant part of the manuscript, while an idyllic term as a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, facilitated its completion. I would like to thank both of these institutions and acknowledge the support of the Herodotus Fund for making the latter fellowship possible. I am also very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and to the College Art Association for the award of a Millard Meiss Publication Grant that enabled the production of the book.

The staffs of numerous institutions have been crucial to the research for this project, and I would like to recognize some of them here. In Britain: The British Library, British Museum, Institute of Historical Research, National Art Library, Warburg Institute, Waddesdon Manor, the J. B. Morrell Library at the University of York, UCL Art Museum, and the University of London Library. In Canada: Richard Virr and Ann Marie Holland at McGill University Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec. In the United States: Julie Mellby at the Graphic Arts Collection, and the Firestone Library and Marquand Library at Princeton University; the Historical Studies and Social Sciences Library, Institute for Advanced Study; the Newberry Library, Chicago, and the Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, Cornell University Library. In France: Philippe de Carbonnières at the Musée Carnavalet, Alan Marshall at the Musée de l’Imprimerie in Lyon, and the staffs of the Archives Nationales, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Archives de Paris, Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Centre National des Arts et Métiers, and Musée Français de la Carte à Jouer at Issy-les-Moulineaux. I would like to reserve a special thank-you for Alain Chevalier, Véronique Despine, and Annick LeGall at the Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille. Without their facilitation of this marvelous and beautifully situated resource, this book would never have got off the ground.

My editor at Penn State University Press, Eleanor H. Goodman, has been wonderfully encouraging since day one, and I have had numerous occasions to be grateful for her efficiency and wisdom as this project has progressed. I would also like to thank Jennifer Norton, Danny Bellett, and Kate Woodford at Penn State University Press and Christine Hosler and Julie Van Pelt of AHPI for expertly steering the book to publication. Part of chapter 1 was published as The Currency of Caricature in Revolutionary France in The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759–1838, edited by Todd Porterfield (Ashgate, 2010); a section of the final chapter appeared as Trompe-l’Oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory After the Terror in Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (2007); and an amended version of chapter 5 was published in The Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (2010). I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these articles for their permission to reproduce material here.

I dedicate this book to my small but perfectly formed family, with more love and gratitude than it is remotely possible for me to express here. Not a word of this book could or would have been written without the love, support, and inspiring example of my mother, Elizabeth Taws, or without the love and companionship of Jo Applin, my first, last, and always best reader.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

At midday on 5 May 1793, a crowd gathered on the Place de la Bastille in eastern Paris to observe a solemn and unmistakably revolutionary ritual. In front of several revolutionary legislators, hangers-on, and assorted observers, workers unearthed a large wooden box that had been buried in the center of the Bastille site less than a year earlier, on 14 July 1792, the third anniversary of the storming of the prison.¹ Installed beneath a stone from the Bastille by the builder-entrepreneur Pierre-François Palloy, the demolisher of the prison and a self-styled patriot, the container comprised part of the foundation for a monument to liberty that was proposed for the site but that never, in fact, saw the light of day. The box functioned as a kind of time capsule, for it contained a motley assortment of objects, all of which provided material evidence of the sweeping political and social changes brought about by the Revolution. Although it might be expected that these objects were vestiges of the Ancien Régime, in fact few of them predated the Revolution itself, while those that did had been remade as overtly revolutionary.

Included in Palloy’s box were an assignat, or paper banknote, of fifty livres and several coins of varying values; four medals made from the chains of the Bastille, representing the ci-devant king, his ministers, and the deputies of both the National Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly; and a copper-bound copy of the Constitution of 1791 (fig. 1). In addition, a bronze plaque engraved with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the Constitution, a portrait of Louis XVI (who had been executed on 21 January 1793, just over three months before the box was unearthed) carved into another Bastille stone, and effigies of the legislators Jean-Sylvain Bailly and Claude-Emmanuel de Pastoret were also packed into this underground casket.² Following speeches by the future consul Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and the deputy Louis-Joseph Charlier, the politically outmoded contents of the container were excavated by order of the National Convention, and, in a reenactment of the demolition on the same site in 1789, they were smashed to pieces beneath the national hammer by the same Palloy who had put them in place the previous year.³

Yet despite the iconoclastic rhetoric that governed this event and the ritualized erasure of the recent past it set in play, these objects were not simply destroyed.⁴ Instead, their bruised remains were piled back into the same cedar box and transported immediately to the National Archives, founded three years previously, where they were placed under the guard of the chief archivist Armand Gaston Camus. Conspicuously but not irretrievably damaged, these obsolete fragments remain there to this day.⁵ The Bastille site, on the other hand, remained empty, despite the hopes for a future characterized by the production and display of effective and enduring symbolic objects that were no doubt in the air that spring day in 1793. It was not until 1840 that it received its permanent monument in the form of a column commemorating the Revolution of 1830.⁶

Revolutions are forced to do stuff with debris, to sort and reframe not only the leftover remnants of the regimes they set out to destroy but the outdated, embarrassing evidence of their earlier selves.⁷ Becoming a revolutionary, to steal a phrase from the historian Timothy Tackett, required the production, and more pressingly, the reproduction, of things.⁸ This tale of revolutionary uncertainty regarding the Revolution’s historical legacy was not an isolated incident but was typical of attempts to use material objects to narrate and, more important, to actively constitute transformations in the temporal and political order of 1790s France. Such responsiveness to the contingencies of the historical process came to typify revolutionaries’ self-conscious performance of their unique situation in time. While it is tempting to read the exhumation of Palloy’s memory-box as indicating the inability of its contents to secure the Revolution’s meaning, longevity is not the only way in which objects acquire currency. Rather, this book will argue, visual practice in revolutionary France was characterized by the production and circulation of a range of transitional, provisional, ephemeral, and half-made images and objects, whose frequently uncertain, fleeting, or makeshift materiality paradoxically provided the most effective ongoing means of negotiating the historical significance of the Revolution.

Occupying a nebulous space between, and overlapping with, the traditional prerogatives of divinely ordained kingship and the new social order of nineteenth-century modernity, France in the 1790s was characterized by frequent shifts in political authority and an embrace of the new that regularly ran up against a persistent desire, shared by revolutionaries of all political orientations, to complete the Revolution. The prospect of revolutionary permanence (if not permanent revolution) was a difficult one to realize, the stabilization and perpetuation of the Revolution requiring a delicate combination of stasis and ongoing incompletion. Throughout the 1790s revolutionaries recognized the potential for art to negotiate this impasse, and the call for the production of enduring monuments, paintings, and public spaces dedicated to the memory of the Revolution came from all points on the revolutionary political spectrum. This was often framed in terms of a perceived distance from the ephemeral displays, dissimulative feints, masquerades, and intrigues considered typical of both Ancien-Régime political culture more generally and the bourgeois art and elite luxury objects that dominated the market in eighteenth-century France.

However, the radical destabilization of systems of patronage and display that accompanied the momentous events of 1789 had engendered massive changes in the conditions under which artists worked.⁹ Shortages of materials and money, combined with a volatile political atmosphere, meant that it was increasingly difficult for painters, sculptors, and architects to carry on as they had before the Revolution. Durability was not easily achieved, and few large-scale artworks or projects for lasting monuments were ever completed, although many were proposed. With some notable exceptions, the space was filled with the production of transient, ephemeral installations, often made for festivals or other revolutionary commemorations, as well as a wide range of new kinds of visual production that the Revolution had either initiated or transformed. These included the eclectic output of official and nonofficial print publishers—calendars, almanacs, paper money, identity cards, newspapers, bureaucratic vignettes, laws, forms, caricatures, playing cards, portraits, songs, topographies, and images of revolutionary events—alongside numerous other souvenirs, relics, paintings, drawings, plans, clothing, and furniture. They provided multiple opportunities for artists and other cultural producers to work in newly straitened circumstances and, often, to experiment in a manner that would not have been possible previously.

In portraying the Revolution as a sort of lacuna, a deserted and sterile space for the history of art, Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, the antiquarian and neoclassical theorist responsible for the conversion of the Panthéon, that monument to the persistence of memory, set the tone for the subsequent reception of much revolutionary visual practice.¹⁰ Although the diversity of revolutionary art has long been recognized, a focus on a few elite artists has contributed to the persistence of a surprisingly tenacious set of assumptions about the indifferent quality of revolutionary artistic practice or, worse, the Revolution’s status as an outright negation of art. With some notable and influential exceptions, art history has tended to isolate for discussion a few key oeuvres from this period, privileging in particular the work of Jacques-Louis David and his students.¹¹ While I am aware of crucial differences in production and use, my aim is not to reinforce the distinction between this kind of institutionally valorized art and the images and objects once described by Linda Nochlin as an odd assortment of second-rate portraits […] historiated toby jugs and indecipherable coarse-grained prints.¹² On the contrary, in examining how revolutionaries attempted to reconfigure their understanding of society, politics, and history via an engagement with the mechanics of transience, it is crucial that we pay attention to how demonstrably artistic works intersected with a diverse field of images conventionally understood to be outside the sphere of art.

David and other academic painters were also, undoubtedly, implicated in the politics of provisionality, and not just in terms of a diversified practice that led to such artists designing everything from playing cards and letterheads to clothing, festivals, and theater sets during these years. Take, for instance, David’s 1794 painting of the child-martyr Joseph Bara (fig. 2), a work that for reasons both intentional and happenstance claims a middle ground between the past and future, between two incompatible regimes, between male and female, between childhood and adulthood, and between life and death.¹³ All of this is rendered in a feathery, irresolute brushwork that breaks down into hazy formlessness at the borders of the image, applied to a canvas that was intended to be paraded through the streets at a revolutionary festival that was planned in full but that never took place because of the downfall of the political regime whose ideology of self-sacrifice it supported. David’s work exemplifies, perhaps more than any other painting, the political stakes of provisionality in 1790s France. It demonstrates the extent to which constructions of subjectivity, gender, revolutionary politics, and artistic style were all subject, in different but overlapping ways, to the unpredictable effects of the Revolution’s adamant forward drive. However, the belatedness of the painting, its fall into obsolescence before it had the opportunity to realize its purpose, and its teetering position between utopian future and revolutionary history only tell us part of the story of how provisional images and objects could be more than the outmoded wreckage of discontinued political systems.

Indeed, the vast majority of visual materials that conveyed the Revolution’s symbolic message around France, whether issued by the state or private interests, were mobile, ephemeral, and multiple. Despite the revolutionary desire for permanent monuments equal to those of Rome or Greece, it was assignats, passports, games, caricatures, certificates, posters, souvenirs, clothing, and engravings—precisely the kind of things that made their way into Palloy’s container—that played the greatest role in transmitting visually the message of the Revolution, although not always in ways that were readily understood or easily managed by either their producers or their multiple consumers. Added to these were the rituals, performances, and impromptu spaces of display, exchange, and forgery, which were even more provisional in nature. As the story of Palloy’s box on the site of the Bastille shows, the visual culture of the Revolution could at various points provide the bedrock for the historical imagination of the Revolution and at the same time be subject to radical and regular revision.

It is a central claim of this book that the temporary character of much of the Revolution’s material culture is not best understood as a sign of the failure of revolutionaries to produce images and objects of lasting importance. On the contrary, it points to a dynamic, contradictory process of experimentation that had profound implications for how revolutionaries became constructed as political subjects. Widely reproduced, ephemeral, in-between images and objects made during the French Revolution were, I argue, a primary site for the formation of both individual subjectivities and wider national or political community identities, and they were at the heart of debates on the nature of political authenticity and historical memory. Usually, of course, permanence was the desired outcome, of both revolutionary politics and visual production—witness the enthusiasm for a monument at the Bastille. However, the means by which permanence could be achieved were not straightforward and were regularly undermined by material, economic, and political constraints. As provisional images began to lose their meaning or value, or were recycled, destroyed, sequestered, or decommissioned, revolutionaries (and those with alternative political affiliations) were forced to think tactically about corporeal, political, and material legitimacy and, in so doing, to consider their relationship to the new ways of understanding time initiated by the Revolution. Thinking about material durability was one of the key ways in which revolutionaries thought about duration, and it was consequently crucial to how they imagined the place of the Revolution in history.

In short, provisional images and objects had currency as producers of meanings that played an active role in shaping their world. Many of these works were explicitly useful objects, made for functional rather than overtly aesthetic ends. Operating in the here and now of the political present, some were necessarily conceived as flexible and evolving, a means to an end, while others came to be considered provisional only after their passing. These images and objects, most of which were produced in quantity, were often made in full consciousness of their status as commodities. The currency of these works, which was, in many cases, inseparable from their status as currency, resided too in their ability to circulate—as reproduced items that could be owned, transmitted, or viewed by a critical mass of individuals—and in their potential to operate as mediums of both change and exchange.

Rather than provide a comprehensive inventory of revolutionary visual culture or long-since-vanished objects (an impossible task in any case), The Politics of the Provisional is an attempt to assess critically the visual politics of revolutionary France. The studies on which each chapter is based draw out distinct and conflicting themes within the political and visual culture of the period, interrogating an archive that is layered, heterogeneous, and contradictory. For reasons of coherence I have concentrated for the most part on images produced in Paris, where the majority of existing images were produced, sold, or legislated for; although at several points this has been neither possible nor desirable, and I am conscious that Paris does not stand for the Revolution as a whole. While ordered thematically rather than chronologically, the book focuses on a conventional revolutionary decade from 1789 to 1799, with some porosity at either end, yet it goes without saying that the narrow historical frame provided by conventions of date limitation is, while seductive, potentially misleading. This is all the more apparent in the context of a temporally complex process such as the French Revolution, whose origins are found long before the storming of the Bastille and whose significance expands well beyond it.

Despite the claims made for them by revolutionaries, almost all of the objects discussed in this book had significant precedents earlier in the eighteenth century, if not before. Few scholars would now subscribe to a reading of the French Revolution as a rupture so absolute that it obliterated all signs of the recent past, and I certainly do not wish to lay claim to a reading of the Revolution as a fully autonomous, coherent historical unit. Rather, the question of how revolutionaries dealt with continuities, both from the previous regime and from earlier moments in the history of the