Marianne vs. Sacred Heart - Sites of Shared Space

With the fall of the Paris Commune and the rise of the Third Republic, we return to three instances of shared space: the building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the aborted suggestion to couple the Basilica and a Liberty statue, and the opposition of Marianne and the Virgin Mary in Third Republic town squares.  It is my intention to evaluate whether the sources under review have adequately prepared us to understand why the issue of symbolism and shared space in the Third Republic was such a contentious issue.

The building of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart was motivated by the desire to expiate the sins of the secular Revolution and France as a whole.  Raymond Jonas, David Harvey and Claude Langlois agree on this point.  Jonas notes the proliferation of Sacred Heart dioceses during the “terrible year” the national vow of Fournier, Legentil and Rohault de Fleury, and the near unanimous consent of the National Assembly as evidence that the Basilica was a popular project.  The perceived connection between the Commune and the secular French Revolution gave it added urgency.  Reconciliation and reconstruction from the ravages of eighty years of revolutionary dialectic took center stage.  Expiation was the evident intent, and the interior mosaic decoration of the Basilica would mirror this intent.

Why was Montmartre chosen as the site to host this monument?  Jonas fails to appreciate the fullest implications the Montmartre site had upon the popular conscious.  He stresses expiation, the martyrdom of Christians and conservatives, and the battle between revolution and counterrevolution as motivations for its construction.  He ignores the attempt to manipulate the memory of those events through the spatial reorganization of the center of the Paris Commune, attributing its selection instead to historical, religious, and geographic factors.  In the end, the site selection came down to these questions, determined through political debate and enacted in the name of public utility.  It seemed more of a project of reconciliation and not expiation.  In the mosaics, Jonas sees a Catholic compromise, rendering a penitent France as Mary Magdalene, who was a former femme de nuit, much like the conservative’s mocking depiction of Marianne.

The spatial reordering does not escape David Harvey and Claude Langlois.  David Harvey makes a more direct link between the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and the Montmartre site.  Harvey recognizes not only the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary battles, but also the secular and religious battles and class conflict between the bourgeois and the workers.  The new monument had to dominate the space of Paris and dominate the memory of everyone who would see it.  The Montmartre site was, according to Harvey, selected as the site where the ashes of the destroyed Commune would best fertilize the expiatory monument.  Some of the quotes he provides are compelling as well, showing that there was indeed a current that wanted expiation and thus eventual eradication of the revolutionary legacy.  The Basilica of the Sacred Heart was no ordinary monument; it was a symbolic “fuck you” to the worst excesses of the revolutionary tradition.

Where Harvey and Jonas represent the extremities of the Monmartre debate, Claude Langlois strikes the middle ground.  He agrees with Jonas that the politics leading up to the choosing of the Montmartre site did not demonstrate the desire to intrude upon the revolutionary space in an attempt at revenge, but there is a fundamental difference between the history of the monument and the memory of the monument.  Memory is indifferent to official history, and it became commonplace to associate the Basilica with the defeat of the workers.  Moreover, as one in a continuing give and take between secularism and clericalism it would lead Gambetta to designate clericalism as the enemy in 1877.  The Basilica of the Sacred Heart represents a decisive turning point in the history of the French Revolution; from here on out, the most contentious battles would be fought between secular and clerical grassroots organizations, with the public school system occupying the most prominent role.

Langlois’ account seems most believable.  Despite the intentions of the politicians and clerics who chose Montmartre as the site for the Basilica, the sharing of space between revolution and counterrevolution through forceful imposition could not be seen as anything else but an affront on the revolutionary tradition.  It is tempting to regard the Basilica as having supplanted revolutionary space, but in reality, the Basilica still sits upon a hill of immense importance to the communards and amid a neighborhood that was still identified with the revolution, and one must conclude that space is still actively being shared.  The complete and total occupation of space and symbol such as was attempted by counterrevolutionaries in Sheryl Kroen’s narrative was no longer possible; from the Third Republic onwards, revolution and counterrevolution would wage their battle through shared space.

The next instance of share space involves a gigantic Statue of Liberty.  On August 3, 1880, the Paris city council proposed placing a statue directly in front of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on public land.  Why was this proposal never carried out?   I would like to look at the problem through the prism of the works reviewed here.  Recall that shared space between Marianne and other counterrevolutionary symbols has a longer history.  She was often adorned with the fleur-de-lys, and in Mona Ozouf’s narrative she was even converted from former statues of the Virgin Mary.  Thus, shared space is not a new phenomenon, so was it inconceivable that an imposing Marianne could share space with the Basilica?

Given that revolution and counterrevolution had to share space in the Third Republic, I believe the natures of the Sacred Heart and Marianne were too antithetical to share space.  The Basilica worked not as a symbol for all Catholics in France, rather liberal Catholics were highly suspicious of the cult of the Sacred Heart for its perceived extremism.  Marianne was not a symbol for everybody. She represented a long line of militant republicanism, and a gigantic statue in the middle of a contentious area in Paris in front of an equally contentious memorial whose construction had been approved six years earlier under an ultra-conservative republican regime would have only highlighted the tensions that simmered stronger than ever in French society.  Thus, even shared space in a highly heterogeneous republic had its limits.

Finally we turn to shared space between Marianne and the Virgin Mary in town squares. They contested space with increasing frequency as the Third Republic progressed, especially in smaller town squares where Marianne would often stand directly in front of the Virgin.  Why was this possible, and the Marianne/Sacred Heart shared space not possible?  The answer lies in Ozouf’s and Agulhon’s narratives, which highlighted the visual and semantic similarities of the two images, as well as the longer history of the contentious relationship between the two.  French citizens would have been familiar with these figures in opposition to one another, because the real dichotomy existed here.  The ability to share space may have been an affront on the part of secular republicans versus clerical counterrevolutionaries, but the ability to share public space ironically led to the cementing of the conflict between the two.  In light of this supposition, I believe Jonas’ statement pitting the Sacred Heart and Marianne against one another, despite its possibly metaphorical intentions, is misplaced.

Concluding Discussion

If nothing else, these works have shown conclusively the importance of symbolism not simply to the revolutionary dialectic, but to politics at large.  The Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary waged symbolic war against Marianne, each side trying to win the hearts and minds of French people.  The dialectic between these forces is more complicated than the tension between revolution and counterrevolution.  The battles between republicans and monarchists between legitimists and Orléanists, between secular and clerical partisans, and between the government and the church, as well as the conflicts among classes complicate the political situation.  Can we then speak of a unitary counterrevolutionary dialectic?

There are more complexities than are mentioned here; nevertheless, dialectics between revolution and counterrevolution are indeed a useful category for analyzing nineteenth century France.  The complexity of the issue is what makes Sheryl Kroen’s and Mona Ozouf’s works so much more compelling, because the fight between revolution and counterrevolution is to accept the multiple sources of discontent.  Kroen shows unequivocally that there was a fundamental difference between royalist counterrevolution and Catholic missionary counterrevolution.  She also gives agency to the political actors from below, who receive relatively little in Ozouf’s work, denying the unitary conception of revolutionary festivals as staged political events from above.  Ozouf’s model is highly unitary and top down, which puts her at odds with Lynn Hunt who takes a much briefer, ground level perspective of the revolution in Politics, Culture and Class.  Agulhon and Jonas rely far too heavily upon a unitary struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, remaining relatively aloof to the profound differences in the counterrevolutionary coalition.

Kroen is also, in her critique of Agulhon, a critique that could be projected to the other works as well.  Although he pays tribute to the unitary struggle between revolution and counterrevolution and the symbolic systems they created, the struggle does not form a central component of his argument.  Only in very rare cases does Agulhon directly juxtapose those symbols, mostly to show the visual and semantic similarities between Marianne and Mary.  Jonas suggests that there was an opposition, but provides no evidence that they physically or symbolically confronted one another.  Finally, Ozouf concerns herself with the different implications of space and time, but her analysis focuses more upon the transition from one system to another than the physical oppositions this engendered.

Finally, we must recognize that Jonas was correct in suggesting that the Sacred Heart did indeed go into battle with Marianne in a metaphorical sense, but this is insufficient.  Symbols are by nature visible phenomena, a fact that of which Jonas is cognizant.  To show the concrete effects that symbols had upon the collective consciousness and the collective memory of the French people, he must show conclusively that, as in the case of the revolutionary festivals, the restoration and the building Basilica of the Sacred Heart, these symbols were involved in a physical battle for space.  This may seem a Structuralist or Habermasian argument to pursue, but Kroen, Ozouf, Agulhon, Harvey and Langlois all stress the centrality of spatial occupation in which symbols became effective in shaping collective memory and consciousness.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

Marianne vs. The Sacred Heart - Historiographical Review

To understand why symbolism was so important to both sides of the revolutionary dialectic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries one must start with Mona Ozouf’s masterful study, Festivals of the French Revolution.  These festivals, an exercise in well-planned spontaneity, attempted to capture both the passions of the pre-Revolutionary festivals and the utopian and logical principles of the Enlightenment to celebrate any number of things related to the French Revolution.  From top to bottom, the revolutionary festival (and here Ozouf is inclined to see their thematic similarities from 1789-1799) was to be the reflection of the ideal principles of the revolution by forming a celebratory mirror as well as an attempt to create the new secular religion that worshiped the nation.

But festivals were more than just a celebration of the revolution.  They were above all an attempt to conquer public space and time through a complete reinvention of traditional columns of life in France.  While some historians prefer reinvention, Ozouf uses the word “purge” to describe the revolutionary festivals’ ability to banish from public eye such emblems and practices of older institutions such as the statues and confined spaces of the monarchical regime, the traditional calendar, and the symbols, rituals and holidays of the Catholic Church.  Ozouf is describing here the first and possibly the most powerful attempt of revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries to control the collective memory of the inhabitants of France through an inventive if not forced policy of elimination of vestiges of the old regime.

Symbolism occupies a unique position in Ozouf’s narrative.  Festivals reinvented the rituals and traditions through a variety of mechanisms, including inventions and concepts founded upon the principles of Enlightenment rationality, songs, slogans, and certainly the civic oath.  However, the reinterpretation of traditional symbols, moreover symbols that would be immediately recognizable to the ordinary citizen, was central to these civic celebrations.  Thus the Liberty Tree and the Maypole were based upon older peasant symbols, the tri-coleur was the compromise between Parisian and Royalist colors, and the Gallic Cock a play on the weathercocks of the seigneurs.  Ozouf suggests two prototypes for the symbol of Liberty: the antique goddess and the Virgin Mary.  Her representations are varied, but nonetheless would be familiar to any Catholic.  She cites the example of a statue of the Virgin being transformed in a festival to a Liberty statue; the Virgin Mary literally became the female goddess Liberty representing the French Republic.  In light of Third Republic tendencies to place the Virgin and Marianne in opposition to one another, this compromise seems singularly fascinating.

Having established Ozouf’s supposition that symbols can dominate space and manipulate memory by replacing that of the older regime, the moment seems opportune to examine Maurice Agulhon’s oeuvre, Marianne into Battle, 1789-1880.  Agulhon’s study traces the evolution of the allegory of Liberty from its inception to its triumph as Marianne after the first insecure years of the Third Republic in both its concrete and idealized forms.  Agulhon wishes to look at these representations, the locations of Liberty and what they mean for the political and intellectual history of the time; there is no overarching thesis here, because representations were so variable.

Agulhon begins by highlighting the insecure nature of the early Liberty; drawn from antiquity and represented most often with a Phrygian cap and a pike to stress the antique origins of the goddess of Liberty, she actually received substantially variable treatment depending upon the artist or the commissioner and their own variable views on the new republic (pg. 1-16).  Liberty was always accompanied with different revolutionary symbols for the purposes of illustrating the variable political statement they were willing to make.  These adornments included the aforementioned Phrygian cap and pike, but also the fleur-de-lys, the red cockade, the tri-coleur, a lion head or a club.  During the Revolution, Liberty was but one in a series of republican personifications.  Her strongest competitor, the representation of the people of France in the form of Hercules, represented the embodiment of the strength of the French people (pg. 13-15).  The allegory of Liberty as a goddess would return in greater numbers during political crises and the subsequent revolutions in 1830, 1848 and 1870 for the political and emotional power she could have upon the people.

Why was Liberty a woman?  Lynn Hunt provides an overview in Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution that is drawn mainly from Agulhon’s various writings.  Liberty represented the virtues of the Republic, “transcendence of localism, superstition, and particularity in the name of a more disciplined and universalistic worship.”  The image of a goddess to represent virtues and principles of government is an old tradition.  The image of a woman in a red bonnet or Phrygian cap provided a clear contrast with the crown.  Liberty was semantically close to the Virgin Mary.  The image of a woman provided distance between the pure virtues of republicanism and the excesses of those charged to carry out the revolution.  Hunt continues this last argument in the Family Romance of the French Revolution when she stresses women’s disenfranchisement from politics; women could be the upholders of virtue (ironic given her description of the Bad Mother) without being political actors.  In the end, Hunt concludes that the choice of the female allegory is “overdetermined.”

Hunt misreads the importance of parallel religious iconography and counterrevolution to Agulhon’s narrative.  The female Liberty did not take hold as the official symbol of the Republic until 1792, when in August and September the Revolution had to mobilize against its enemies abroad and against dangerous elements of counterrevolution at home.  This came at the time of increasing insurrections in Paris and the provinces and military defeat at the hands of the Prussians at Verdun.  Abbé Grégoire submitted a report that recommended the female Liberty should be depicted on the official seal as a way of reversing the influence of Catholicism through republican education (pg. 16).  Subsequent depictions of Liberty in the nineteenth century, especially during the July Monarchy, borrowed heavily from images of the Virgin Mary (p.58).  Agulhon provides this explanation:

The Catholic Church had left the imprint of its rituals and settings on the general culture.  These had almost always been appropriated by the Counter-Revolution and thus the Church involuntarily encouraged the Revolution to forge equivalent psychological weapons for itself.  The words goddess, rite, cult flowed easily from the pen and entered Revolutionary language in the form of approximative metaphors even before they were taken over by the counter-religion which eventually developed (99).

The importance of counterrevolutionary pressures upon the development and proliferation of Marianne in the nineteenth century are evident.  Although Napoleon arguably completed some of Liberty’s triumphs, he was also concerned with cementing his own legitimacy and enforcing the protection of the Catholic Church.  Liberty paid the price.  Sheryl Kroen demonstrates how the Restoration Monarchy was greatly concerned with enforcing oubli through the systematic destruction of revolutionary and imperial symbolism, and the July Monarchy would only tolerate Liberty in regions thought to be too legitimist (certainly not in Paris).  After the brief Second Republic, Napoleon III took to suppressing republican imagery, and forced Marianne underground.  Marianne, having recently been re-given her name (evidence suggests that Marianne was used as early as 1792, but it did not enter the popular consciousness until the second half of the nineteenth century) as a derisory term by counterrevolutionaries in Languedoc, emerged as inseparable from the Republic in public consciousness.  The experience as an underground symbol of opposition and the explosion of Mariannes during the Paris Commune paved the way for her proliferation during the Third Republic.

What is striking about Agulhon’s narrative is the importance placed upon symbolism and space both by proponents of Marianne and her opponents.  In one sense, the frantic building of statues, the dissemination of paintings and prints, and the frequency of live allegories testify the importance of spatial domination in official politics.  On the other hand, the vigor with which post-republican regimes took to purging public spaces of Marianne images is shocking.  Sheryl Kroen explores how important spatial hegemony is to the dynamism of politics.

In her book Politics and Theater, Kroen’s aims are threefold.  First, she attempts to restore agency and dynamism to the political culture of the Restoration regime, which had been sorely lacking; second, she stresses the importance of the theatrical nature of politics under the restoration, with particular emphasis on the metaphor of the play Tartuffe; third, she shows how expiation and the forced policy of oubli was the most important political theme of the period, but it was far from homogenous.  Kroen is able to expose a major fault line between the Monarchy and the Catholic Church, problematizing the singularity of the revolutionary dialectic.

The restored Monarchy and supporters of the Catholic Church were the two strongest agents in the counterrevolutionary reaction, but they did not operate in tandem.  The Bourbons struck an offensive tone with respect to purging the nation of the revolutionary legacy, but Kroen highlights their crisis of legitimacy in the wake of twenty-five years of turmoil as obstacles to their consolidation of power.  Kroen stresses the tensions between the overzealous Catholic Church and the Monarchy, whose program was equally directed at bringing clerics under their control.  The clergy wanted to remember (expiation); the monarchy to forget (oubli).  Kroen’s analysis highlights the discord between counterrevolutionary factions; indeed, the counterrevolution was not a unitary doctrine drawn from multiple sources of political thought as described by Massimo Boffa in the Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution.  It was not a “counterrevolution,” it was a “counter-revolution,” or systematic repudiation of the principles of 1789 through the contrary policies of expiation and oubli.  It was carried out by righteous destruction of the revolutionary legacy.

The counter-revolution was righteous because expiation was carried out with such vigor by supporters of the “new Catholicism,” which was strongly evangelical at the grassroots and supportive of the monarchy as the position of leadership for all Christians of the nation:

Expiation required remembering the sins of the past in detail because without remembering there could be no repentance and, therefore, no salvation.  What this translated into in practice was a religious revival in which missionaries traveled around France doing everything they could to remind the population of the revolutionary interlude...raised the specter of the Enlightenment...reopened old controversies: between constitutional and refractory priests and their congregations, between acquirers of biens nationaux...between supporters of the Revolution...and royalists...erecting mission crosses where a cross had been violently attacked during the Revolution...reconsecrating the landscape to Christ and their King.

While Kroen’s subject in the first part of her book is the unmaking of the revolutionary legacy through expiation and oubli, the second part of her book focuses on the agency of the dispossessed in preserving that legacy.  Although denied participation in the political process, French citizens reacted through clandestine politics on the one hand, and public visual and ritual display and resistance on the other.  Her thesis is much the same as that of Maurice Agulhon on the subject of Marianne in the Second Empire: when driven underground, the revolution consolidated and legitimizes.  The reaction against the worst abuses of the Catholic Church during the Restoration fomented popular anticlericalism and the politics of ritual resistance that lead to national revolution in July of 1830, as opposed to a strictly Parisian revolution.  Tartuffe was the greatest symbol of this ritual resistance, and has its parallels in the staging of politics as theater. Kroen does not deal explicitly with Liberty as allegory.

The strength of Kroen’s work is most definitely the care with which she constructs and nuances the revolutionary dialectic not strictly on the political level, but on the symbolic level.  Kroen’s work is the only work under review here in which we get a palpable sense of the opposition between revolutionary symbol and counterrevolutionary symbol, not just symbols as representative of the revolutionary dialectic.  Raymond Jonas’ work does not explore this phenomenon and is consequently not as compelling in the history of the revolutionary dialectic.

Whenever Marianne went into battle, the Sacred Heart met her.  That is the proposition used by Raymond Jonas to demonstrate the importance of the Sacred Heart as a symbol of defense against the godless Revolution.  Essentially, Jonas traces the lineage of the Cult of the Sacred Heart from its virtual inception (the Cult of the Sacred Heart existed before the visions of Marguerite-Marie Alacoq, but negligibly in numbers) where it became inextricably linked to the triumph of the French nation as favored by God, through its use as a protective emblem against the Marseille plague of 1720-1721 and to its inception as an emblem of counterrevolution in the Vendée.  Jonas’ account of the counterrevolution essentially follows the argument of Timothy Tackett in Religion, Revolution and Regional Culture in Eighteenth Century France in seeing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy as the most important issue leading to conflict against the French Revolution, while ignoring the social and economic factors such as urbanization, peasant-bourgeois relations, and systems of landowning that may have exacerbated its effect.  The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was more of a wedge issue or a referendum on the progress of the revolution not just among clerics, but one among the people that set social forces in motion either for or against the French Revolution.  Jonas gives far too little agency to the peasantry in making their own decisions, and far too much in the ability of the clergy to coerce parishioners.

Jonas shows how refractory priests used their opposition to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and the appropriation of church property to speak out in divine terms against revolutionary excesses, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Enlightenment rationality and anticlericalism, which were seen to be an affront on the social and cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church (62, 75).  Whereas revolutionaries spoke of the ignorance and fanaticism of Catholic values, the Catholic Church countered by singling out liberty, equality and Voltaire as the most dangerous of evils and supported the supposition that the Revolution was divine retribution for a France that had sinned.  Redemption and salvation required expiation (67-75).  At the urging of refractory priests, pilgrimages to sites like Lourdes increased dramatically, demonstrating the popular anxiety over the fate of France in the face of popular and often violent anti-clericalism (76-83).

The Sacred Heart was adopted as a protective emblem against revolutionary evil partly as a result of its perceived successes in the Marseille epidemic, and partly as a result of rumors surrounding the royal family and their own private devotion to the Sacred Heart (Marie Antoinette possessed an emblem, and it was rumored Louis XVI consecrated France to the Sacred Heart) (86-100).  The unity of the Catholic Church and the Monarchy in their devotion to the Sacred Heart compelled Vendéens to use it as a symbolic emblem in their revolt against the revolutionary government.  The Vendée war looked as much like a war of religion as it did a war about politics to Jonas (100-111).  The Machecoul Massacres brought secular revolutionary symbols back to the Vendée, and presumably, along with the confrontation against the pro-revolutionary National Guard, this is where Jonas sees the first meeting of Marianne and the Sacred Heart in battle (113-115).

Jonas agrees with Sheryl Kroen concerning the Restoration.  The cult of the Sacred Heart was transformed into a symbol of Christian missionary activity that placed a heavy stress upon expiation.  The themes of revolutionary discord, reconciliation through Christian renewal, restored moral order of the church and a public consecration to the Sacred Heart appeared among its partisans.  The new Bourbon regime was too moderate to consider public consecration to a symbol that carried so much counterrevolutionary baggage.  Its detractors protested by creating a Cult of the Sacred Heart of Marat (Jonas Chapter V).

Jonas skips ahead forty years in history and returns to the theme of the Sacred Heart before its hour of national triumph.  Catholic memory of 1870 and 1871 took place within the confines of the Sacred Heart as a vehicle to imagine divine judgment and condemnation for France’s sinful past (148).  The defeat at the hand of the Prussians supported the degeneration theory.  The Paris Commune’s killing of clerics and references to Jacobinism confirmed the connection between the two revolutions.  The fallout from the struggle to defend the Vatican against a secular revolution further antagonized Catholics against the secular revolution.  The responses are well-known; Vendéens moved to defend the Vatican adorned with Sacred Heart emblems, others marched into a suicide charge against the Prussians north of Paris, while Alexander Legentil and Hubert Rohault de Fleury vowed to build a monument to the Sacred Heart that was to make amends for the rupture brought by the French Revolution (150-176).

The fall of the Paris Commune paved the way for national expiation in the form of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the Butte de Montmartre.  Jonas credits the success of the Sacred Heart motif to its proponents through their mass marketing techniques.  Before the Basilica of the Sacred Heart invaded Parisian space, the emblem of the Sacred Heart had invaded French space in the form of thousands of pin-sized emblems.  The importance of visibility of the Sacred Heart ultimately culminated in placing the Basilica where it could be visible to anyone in Paris.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

Marianne vs. The Sacred Heart - Symbolism and the Revolutionary Dialectic

The female allegory for Liberty and for France herself, Marianne, has a long history. The rise of Marianne as an important symbol of republican France is concurrent with the rise of the French Revolution and the republican ideology to which it gave birth. Her importance was always heightened in revolutionary times, and after the fall of the Paris Commune became perhaps one of the most important that represented the Third Republic. The other visual republican symbols that represented revolutionary interests included the tri-coleur, the red cockade (liberty cap), the Gallic Cock, Hercules, and references to favorite revolutionary heroes, including busts and even the Sacred Heart of Marat.

 At an intersection between history and memory stands the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on top of the Butte de Montmartre in Paris. Its history is long, its meaning is rife with contestation, and its visual power is apparent to anyone who visits Paris. What makes this monument’s legacy so intriguing is how a small group of devotees to the heart of Jesus could somehow embed this symbol into the central political debate of the nineteenth century, namely, the dialectic between revolution and counterrevolution raging at least since the 1790s, if not well before. The Sacred Heart was not the only symbol that represented popular counterrevolutionary interests; some others included the fleur-de-lys and the white banner representing popular royalism, while the crucifix and the Virgin Mary were symbols of popular Catholicism.

 The inspiration for this paper is the assertion by Raymond Jonas that the Sacred Heart rushed to the counterrevolutionary defense whenever Marianne marched into battle. This statement, while metaphorical and intentionally oversimplified, reveals a fundamental truth about the battle for the hearts and minds of the French people through popular symbolism in which the dichotomy between Marianne and the Sacred Heart played a fundamental role. Whether they were used on the offensive during moments of revolutionary fervor, or used as monuments for the effacement of memory or expiation for the sins of the prior regime, symbols were crucial in the battle over memory, loyalty and public space.

 This paper will start with three examples of Marianne and the Sacred Heart coming face to face. The decision to build the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on top of the Butte de Montmartre in Paris in the 1870s and the aborted suggestion by a Paris City Council to build a New York City sized statue of Liberty (Marianne) directly in front of the Basilica in 1880 show us how shared space between the two symbols was or was not possible, and the practice of placing monuments to Marianne and the Virgin Mary in opposition to one another in town squares during the nascent years of the Third Republic show us…?. From these incidents during the Third Republic, I will move backwards to the French Revolution 1789-1799 and move forward through the nineteenth century to examine the historical roots of symbolism in the revolutionary dialectic and how they led to such powerful opposition to shared space.

 The essay will be a historiographical review of several works that have treated the subjects in various forms, with an extended discussion of the usefulness of the studies in understanding these three situations, and a concluding discussion at the end. Two notes for clarification: Marianne as the name of the Liberty figure did not come into popular usage until the latter half of the nineteenth century, so I will honor this distinction by using Liberty for the pre-Second Empire era and Marianne for the remainder. Symbol will be used as an umbrella term for image, allegory and representation for simplicity.

Robert Nelson is blogger-in-chief at History News, Notes and Arguments. Find us on Google+ or on Facebook.

The Paris Commune

Moving away from the order and structure of the Haussmanization of Paris, this week we confront the chaos of the Commune and the city under siege. However, we are also confronting three attempts to make sense of the disorder of the period, whether it be political, social, or cultural. Here we have three very different attempts at doing just that. The Communards of Paris is a neutral political narrative in which the reader is given the completed puzzle first, and then shown the jigsaw pieces that we can arrange in any manner we choose. Civil War in France is a Marxist (can you call Marx’s writings Marxist?) interpretation of the historical class-warfare dialectic that had already doomed the commune before it began. Finally, Paris in Despair is an ambitious if not entirely successful attempt to gauge the importance of this crisis point in the world of art. The Marx piece is well written and powerfully argues as usual, but as full of problems as any base-superstructure interpretation can be. The Communards of Paris is a reasonable attempt to show the contingent nature of Commune period, but falls short in just about every category save that of politics. Paris in Despair is a schizophrenic rendering of cultural changes that could benefit from better organization.

Without wasting too much time on The Communards of Paris, I would like to question the reliance upon documents that illustrate the political history that was rather thoroughly described in the historical introduction. Wouldn’t it have been much more fruitful to include several chapters along the line of chapter 10 (The Commune –‘Festival of the Oppressed’). Perhaps this is just a belated recognition on my part that there weren’t nearly as many “cultural” historians around in 1973 when this book was put together as part of the larger series Documents of Revolution. It is interesting though, that this editor overloads the reader with political documents after having spent most of the historical introduction stressing the relative anarchy of the Paris Commune; the contradiction is heightened when compared to the narratives of order and planning that one gets when confronting the literature of the Second Empire.

Moving back towards order, the next book we confront is Karl Marx, Civil War in France. I have to admit that enjoying a good Marx piece is one of my guilty academic pleasures. For a polemic that is so utterly convincing, yet enraging at the same time, there are none better. Take, for instance, his predictions on foreign policy that both Engels, in 1891 and Lenin post-WWI couldn’t help but highlight. His arrogant and self-assured vision that Alsace-Lorraine would be the spark plug for another war between France and the Prussian state, as well as the wedge that would drive France away from diplomatic cooperation with Bismarck and into the arms of Russia, possibly initiating a war of unprecedented carnage between the Germans and the “Slavonian and Roman races,” is all the more prophetic in the twenty-first century than it was in Lenin’s or Engels’ time. Of course one need only look at initial enthusiasm for war in 1914 on everyone’s part to realize that his peaceful workers’ opposition to war didn’t materialize quite the way he wanted to. Another reason Marx is so convincing is his unparalleled ability to turn elder statesmen like Adolphe Thiers or Jules Favre into spineless bourgeois conspirators hardly more honorable than a jackal and hardly more intelligent than an eggplant. It’s a trope that I imagine many contemporary historians wish was acceptable in the field today.

Of course Marx is equally as aggravating as he is entertaining and insightful. His willingness to simplify world history to dialectic of class conflict clearly ignores the extent to which the lines were not nearly so well defined as he would have them. The Paris Commune was no exception. First of all, his definition of the proletarian ambiguously implies that the Paris Commune was run by wageworkers, but as we saw last week in the Harvey and the Pinckney, a sizable portion of Parisian workers were actually worker-proprietors of their own establishments, and probably more Proudhonist than Blanquist...how to deal with their involvement in the Paris Commune? The National Guard is another ambiguous case. Although numbers were inflated to approximately 300,000 due to the war, a large majority of whom were probably what Marx would define as proletarian, the National Guard is still a bourgeois institution at it’s core...how to define the involvement of bourgeois who defended the commune from Thiers’ forces?

This indeed begs the larger question, of who exactly was participating in the Commune; who was a worker, who was bourgeois, who was a bohême? Marx’s concentration on the base-superstructure of the conflict in Paris leaves out the question of contingency, the acts of the men and women of the commune, personality and policy of the Commune “government.” However, is what Marx so admired about the Commune, is it’s effectiveness given the lack of any central government. In doing this, Marx rather brushes aside the failures of the Commune government to stave off defeat, mostly, because the commune was doomed to defeat in the first place; thus, his heroic “folly.” The most evident absurdities of Civil War in France, however, rest in the idealized portrait of everyday life under the Commune. Take his assertion that, without any law-enforcing power whatsoever, the streets of Paris were safer than ever before. Could it be that anyone with any criminal tendency was involved in fighting the republican army at the Paris front? Or could it be that in the proletarian Commune, Marx saw a brief realization of his “end of history”?

Finally, my own personal pet peeve with Marx is the amount of time he devotes to retrospective military strategizing, especially in suggesting that the Communards should have marched to Versailles to crush Thiers’ forces instead of retreating and consolidating the commune. If the Commune was such a “folly” doomed to failure before the start, what is the point of launching a coordinated military operation? Finally, for a man who rejected war as a solution to problems, he sure envisions himself as a proletarian military genius.

Now we take a giant leap, from the longue durée of Marx to the psychology of artists under siege. Hollis Clayson’s Paris in Despair isn’t one unified study, it is actually three separate studies masquerading as one, one Certeau-ian, one Freudian, and one that Pierre Nora would look upon favorably. The first study, roughly corresponding to the first two sections of the book and in selected passages thereafter treats the changing scene in Paris through the artist’s depiction of changing rituals and routines, such as adapting to the loss of ubiquitous street lighting or making rat consumption a haute bourgeois phenomenon. The second study analyzes the impact of the siege upon the art of a select few during and after the siege. Finally, the third study is a half-hearted attempt on Clayson’s part to give some significance to the lieux de mémoire created in Paris after the memories of the siege had grown cold and more distant.

The first study was by far the most effective of the three. At one point in time, Clayson attempts to explain the significance of a painting depicting a crowd heralding their newly elected leaders simply by implying that this is something that normally wouldn’t happen. Simple, but accurate. Indeed the focus of this study is immediately apparent in the analysis of the Binant series, where one immediately gets the sense that the siege powerfully disrupted normalized ritual behavior and in its stead set up a whole new series of behavioral norms. He is also very clear (indeed, repetitively clear) that the causes of the behavioral change was not the physical presence of the enemy in occupation, but the distance of an enemy that resembles an absentee landlord...invisible, but very real and debatably hegemonic. “Claustrophobia, boredom, restlessness, disrupted routine, thwarted agency, new social roles, and patriotism,” are the most important themes altering the behavior of Parisians. He is also effective at moving away from any class based representation, other than identifying the ubiquity of the bourgeoisie despite their remove from any siege related events, as well as his effective reading of gender divides and the importance of homosocial behavior on the front.

After reading the first study (as well as the title of the book, with the emphasis being on Paris) I was all ready for individualized studies into the effects of the siege upon these six artists’ ordering of Parisian life. What we got instead was a series of abstracted psychological profiles that, most of the time, have little to do with Paris or the siege. I recognize that my reading of this section is significantly jaded; this, in fact, was Clayson’s main preoccupation, namely, the effects of this period on the personal agency of the artist. I do have problems with projecting contemporary psychological evaluations upon historical figures in an attempt to better understand their agency, and in this section is an egregious attempt to do just that.

I cannot reconcile it, however, with the preceding section which was so effective at recognizing a social order in flux in siege-afflicted Paris. Clayson recognized the discontinuity; he expressly advises the reader to avoid seeing this section as a series of case studies, and although he doesn’t want to generalize about common trends, he feels the need to do just that in his conclusion. It would seem that he was unsuccessful at answering the gigantic paragraph of questions he set out for himself in his introduction, and consequently felt the need to tie it all together for his reader. It may seem like I am scrutinizing the purpose of a formal conclusion, but I find that it represents a break from the rest of this section. Furthermore, for his avowal to avoid art that dealt directly with combat, he does spend a lot of time analyzing the homosocial bonds created by the soldiers in their ramparts or their stations, which begs the question as to what Clayson considers to be “combat”; was it strictly the exchange of gunfire and artillery, or doesn’t combat also imply the experience on the front lines during periods where lead balls don’t fill the sky?

I don’t wish to spend too much time dwelling on the final study, an analysis of lieux de mémoire, because once again I feel that it bears little resemblance to either of the two previous studies, and in general, is not convincing. There are one thousand and one different ways of talking about collective memory or collective amnesia, and the events of 1870-1 are prime candidates for such a study, but Clayson’s own study reads like a brief epilogue that doesn’t discuss in any great detail the artist’s agency or the representation of ritual behavior that he had discussed in such detail throughout the rest of the book. Aside from his discussion of Degas’ Place de La Concorde, the reader has very little to link the lieux de mémoire erected to remember 1870-1 with the events of this same period.

My issues with the book stem mostly from the thematic structure of the book. The most effective recurring themes were the gendering of social relations and roles that were ordered differently before the siege, as well as the new ordering of space that took place amidst the claustrophobia in Paris as well as in the proverbial trenches. Unfortunately, the overload of information that fills approximately 375 pages of print detracts from the most effective message Clayson has to offer. When all is said and done, Karl Marx offers a clear, concise, structured and important version of the Paris Commune. Clayson’s account appears to me to be one in a long series of cultural histories in which the author himself/herself reduces the work to relative meaninglessness. At several points, one can sense that Clayson is loathe to draw any wide-ranging or far-reaching conclusions about the significance of his work. Take, for example, his treatment of the significance of the entire siege upon his artists. At various times it is a crisis point or a radical break, where at others it is a bracket or it is non-existent. Ultimately, I can’t discern any larger message other than that everyone’s experience must have been different.

In the end, I liked the Communards of Paris and Civil War in France for their one-sided approach to their problem, and Paris in Despair drove me up a wall for its multi-faceted yet ultimately hollow analysis of culture during the Commune.