THE POLITICS OF THE PROVISIONAL

Frontmatter.indd 1 12/4/12 2:34 PM Frontmatter.indd 2 12/4/12 2:34 PM THE POLITICS OF THE PROVISIONAL

ART AND EPHEMERA IN REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

RICHARD TAWS The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Frontmatter.indd 3 12/4/12 2:34 PM 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. Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Printed in China by Everbest Printing Ltd., Data through Four Colour Print Group, Louisville, KY Taws, Richard, 1977– Published by The Pennsylvania State University The politics of the provisional : art and ephemera Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 in revolutionary France / Richard Taws. p. cm. The Pennsylvania State University Press is a Summary: “Examines how ephemeral images and member of the Association of American objects made in 1790s France mediated the University Presses. memory of the French Revolution and enabled new forms of political subjectivity”—Provided by It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State publisher. University Press to use acid-free paper. Publica- Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and tions on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum index. requirements of American National Standard for isbn 978-0-271-05418-6 (cloth : alk. paper) Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for 1. Art—Political aspects—France—History— Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. 18th century. 2. Art and popular culture—France—History— 18th century. 3. France—History—Revolution, 1789–1799. I. Title. Additional credits: page i, detail of figure 84; N72.P6T39 2013 701'.03094409033—dc23 pages ii–iii, detail of figure 60; pages iv–v, 2012017708 detail of figure 45; pages vi–vii, detail of figure 33.

Frontmatter.indd 4 12/4/12 2:34 PM FOR JO

Image is 122%. Not in color in the text.

Frontmatter.indd 5 12/4/12 2:34 PM On the tribune the bonnet rouge was painted in gray. The royalists started laughing at this gray bonnet rouge, this false room, this cardboard monu- ment, 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)

Frontmatter.indd 6 12/4/12 2:34 PM CONTENTS

ix List of Illustrations xi Acknowledgments xiii List of Abbreviations

1 Introduction

13 chapter one Made of Money: Transparent Bodies, Authentic Values, Paper Signs

43 chapter two Between States: Passports, Certificates, and Citizens

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

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

119 chapter five Material Futures: Marking Time in a Revolutionary Almanac

143 chapter six Paper Traces: Playing Games with the Revolutionary Past

167 Conclusion

171 Notes 187 Bibliography 203 Index

Frontmatter.indd 7 12/4/12 2:34 PM Frontmatter.indd 8 12/4/12 2:34 PM ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Constitution of 1791, damaged by P.-F. Palloy in May 1793 2 Gabriel, Riquetti, Mirabeau, député de Provence aux États 2. Jacques-Louis David, La mort de Joseph Bara 5 généraux de 1789, mort le 2 avril 1791 57 3. Letterhead, le directoire du département de la Nièvre à la 28. Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Jeanbon Saint-André 58 commission des administrations civiles, police et tribunaux 9 29. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Portrait of 4. Jean-Pierre Droz, assignat, twenty-five sols 15 Citizen Belley, Ex-representative of the Colonies 60 5. Billet de vingt sols, municipalité de Laval, département 30. Passport issued to Anne-Louis Girodet 62 de la Mayenne 15 31. Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Self-Portrait 62 6. Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux, assignat (illuminated from beneath to 32. Jean Beugnet, Congé absolu, pour passer aux vétérans, show “La Nation” watermark), fifteen sous 16 délivré à Médart 64 7. O Sacre Dieu—uns bekomm bien die Liberte-Welch ein 33. Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux [inv.] and Pierre-Alexandre Tardieu Wollöben! Es fleust der Milk und die Hönick! Ah ça ira! 19 [sculp.], assignat, four hundred livres 65 8. Bon de cinquante livres; Dieu et le Roi 20 34. Nicolas [inv.] and Delettre [sculp.], Brevet du vainqueur 9. Assignat of five francs folded in the manner of the Vendéens de la Bastille, décerné en vertu du décret de l’Assemblée and the Chouans to read “la mort de la République” 21 Nationale du 19 juin 1790 à Pierre Fillon 67 10. L’homme aux assignats 22 35. Antoine Vestier, Portrait de Latude 68 11. La Bourse protège les agioteurs 23 36. Jean-Jacques Hauer, General Lafayette and Mme. Roland 12. Leonard Schenck and Pieter Schenck II, Mr Jean Law 25 Drawing a Plan for the Festival of Federation in 1791 72 13. Camus et un acolyte accueillent un couple de rentiers 26 37. Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, Vue du Champ de Mars le 14. L’impayable rentier de l’état, que ne suis-je Camus 27 14 juillet 1790 73 15. Ouf! 27 38. Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault 16. Jacques-Louis David, Marat assassiné 29 [sculp.], Fédération générale faite à Paris le 14 juillet 1790 77 17. Adoration des patriotes, à l’aspect d’un gros-sous, dessinée en 39. Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault France d’après nature l’an (sans argent) 3 de la liberté 30 [sculp.], Les troupes du Champ de Mars partant pour 18. Le roi mangeant des pieds à la Sainte Menehould, le maitre la place Louis XV le 12 juillet 1789 77 du poste confronte un assignat et reconnait le roi 32 40. Étienne Béricourt, Divertissement pendant les travaux 19. L’expirante Targinette 38 préparatifs de la fête de la Fédération 81 20. Cas des assignats, chez l’étranger 39 41. Les travaux du Champ de Mars, from Almanach de la 21. Passport issued to Louis Baraud 44 Fédération de France 82 22. Carle Vernet [inv. del.] and François Godefroy [sculp.], 42. Vue des travaux du Champ de Mars par les parisiens, Formulaire du congé absolu 45 l’an 1er de la liberté le 12 juillet 1790 83 23. Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux [inv.] and François-Noel Sellier 43. Hubert Robert, Fête de la Fédération au Champ de Mars 87 [sculp.], Projet d’un monument pour consacrer la Révolution 48 44. La nation française assistée par M. De Lafayette terrasse le 24. Passport issued to Augustin Désiré 49 despotisme et les abus du regne feodal qui terrassaient 25. Isaac Cruikshank after John Nixon, Le Gourmand 53 le peuple 89 26. Anatole Devosge after Jacques-Louis David, Le Peletier de 45. Louis Lecoeur after Jacques-François-Joseph Swebach- Saint-Fargeau sur son lit de mort 56 Desfontaines, Serment fédératif du 14 juillet 1790 90 27. Charles-François-Gabriel Levachez [inv. del. medallion] 46. La Fédération faite le 14 juillet 1790, almanach pour 1791 91 and Jean Duplessi-Bertaux [inv. del. vignette], Honoré, 47. Cloquet [del.] and Le François [scripsit.], Vue générale

Frontmatter.indd 9 12/4/12 2:34 PM de la Fédération française prise à vôl d’oiseau au-dessus aux amis de la Constitution (detail showing figures on right-hand de Chaillot 92 side of print) 135 48. Meusnier, Plan général du Champ de Mars et du nouveau 70. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié cirque 92 aux amis de la Constitution (detail of “marble”) 135 49. Antoine Donchery, Portrait de Pierre-François Palloy 98 71. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié 50. Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Modèle de la Bastille 100 aux amis de la Constitution (detail of newspaper vendor, 51. Certificat d’artiste, et d’ouvrier en bâtiment 101 version with calendar attached) 137 52. Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Stone from the Bastille, 72. Label for Pharmaceutical Goods Sold by L. Chedeville 138 with Attached Plan of the Bastille 104 73. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, La paix. A Bonaparte pacificateur 140 53. Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Medal Made from 74. J. Benizy dit. Jean Dubuisson [del. sculp.], Valeur des Bastille Remnants 105 assignats et autres papiers monnaies 144 54. Antoine Cosme Giraud, Le XIV juillet MVCCLXXXX 106 75. François Bonneville, Tableau d’assignats avec portraits de 55. Vue de la fête donnée sur le plan de la Bastille 108 victimes et de profiteurs 144 56. Le dégel de la nation 109 76. A. W. Huffner, Verbrennung der Assignaten in Paris am 57. Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, Modèle de la Bastille 113 19ten Febr. 1796 145 58. Hubert Robert, La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa 77. Les députés de la Gironde condamnés à mort jetant des démolition 115 assignats au peuple qui les déchire 148 59. Attaque de la petite Bastille 116 78. Jean-Louis Prieur [inv. del.] and Pierre-Gabriel Berthault 60. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié [sculpt.], Statue de Louis XIV abatue 150 aux amis de la Constitution 120 79. Design for a Circular Tabatière Lid 156 61. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Calendrier républicain 125 80. Villeicht enthüllen sich der Weissen vorsicht woege; auch selbst 62. Louis Lecoeur, La Constitution française 125 durch Robespierre 158 63. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié 81. Workshop of Pierre-François Palloy, Trompe-l’Oeil Table with aux amis de la Constitution (detail of upper section) 127 Playing Cards 159 64. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Préparatifs de la fête de la 82. Tableau d’une partie des crimes commis pendant la Révolution Fédération 129 et particulièrement sous le règne de la Convention nationale 163 65. Montagne élevée au champ de la réunion pour la fête de l’Être 83. Assignat (illuminated from beneath to show watermark), Suprême le 20 prairial l’an 2eme 130 five hundred livres 164 66. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié 84. François Bonneville, Tableau des assignats (avec cartes à jouer aux amis de la Constitution (detail of pamphlet seller) 131 et lunettes) 164 67. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, La croisée 132 85. Bailly conduit Voltaire et autres précurseurs de la Révolution 68. Jean-Germain Drouais, Soldat romain blessé 133 française vers la cité future 168 69. Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Almanach national, dédié

x | illustrations

Frontmatter.indd 10 12/4/12 2:34 PM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would have remained a provisional object itself were For friendship, collaboration, conversation, and advice of it not for the guidance and support of numerous individuals various kinds, in various places, and over different periods of over many years. I have a lot of people to thank, and whole- time, many thanks are also due to Steven Adams, Emma Barker, heartedly so, although limitations of space prevent me from John Barrell, Serge Bianchi, Yve-Alain Bois, Juliet Carey, being as specific as I would like. My first debt is to Helen Richard Clay, Nancy W. Collins, Julia Douthwaite, Jane Elliott, Weston and Tom Gretton, two remarkable teachers and Alan Forrest, Amy Freund, Anthony Geraghty, Mark Hallett, writers who ignited my interest in the French Revolution, Claudette Hould, Ben Kafka, Anne Lafont, Valerie Mainz, encouraged me to pursue this subject, and offered tremendous Sarah Monks, Satish Padiyar, Magali Philippe, Rolf Reichardt, insight, inspiration, and assistance along the way. My col- Emily Richardson, Harriet Riches, Adrian Rifkin, John David leagues at University College London (UCL) have provided a Rhodes, Vanessa Schwartz, Matthew Shaw, Susan Siegfried, model for critically engaged thought, intellectual exchange, Christina Smylitopoulos, Rebecca Spang, Tamara Trodd, Sarah and collegiality. Conversations over many years with David Victoria Turner, Dror Wahrman, Sue Walker, Alicia Weisberg- Bindman, Warren Carter, Emma Chambers, T. J. Demos, Roberts, Bronwen Wilson, Alan Wintermute, and Beth S. Diana Dethloff, Natasha Eaton, Mechthild Fend, Briony Fer, Wright. Lynn Hunt’s work has been an inspiration for many Charles Ford, Andrea Fredericksen, Tamar Garb, Nicholas years, and I have valued tremendously her incredibly perceptive Grindle, Andrew Hemingway, Sarah James, Petra Lange-­ and generous responses to my work. Colin Jones, Jann Matlock, Berndt, Maria H. Loh, Martin Perks, Rose Marie San Juan, Todd Porterfield, Katie Scott, and Richard Wrigley read all or Stephanie Schwartz, Libby Sheldon, Frederic Schwartz, part of the text in its various incarnations. Their guidance and Frances Stracey, and Alison Wright have shaped and continue immensely thoughtful comments have been hugely appreciated to shape my thinking on this and numerous other topics. It and have significantly shaped the text that follows. Katherine was a particular honor to be invited to present some of the Crawford and Erika Naginski both read the manuscript in its new material in this book as the 2010 Tomás Harris Lectures at entirety and offered remarkably engaged and helpful sugges- UCL; the feedback I received on those occasions helped me tions. Any errors that remain are, of course, entirely my own. formulate several key aspects of chapters 4 and 5. Aspects of this book were presented during the course of I would also like to thank my former colleagues in the its preparation at a diverse range of conferences, symposia, and Department of Art History and Communication Studies at lectures, and it always came away better as a result—I am McGill University, as well as those elsewhere in Montreal, grateful to all those who have invited me to present this where much of this book was written, in particular Darin material and to all the participants and audiences at these Barney, Susan Dalton, Peggy Davis, Dominic Hardy, Cecily events. Many thanks are also due to my students in Montreal Hilsdale, Amelia Jones, Nikola von Merveldt, Tom Mole, and London, on whom I regularly tested parts of this book, Andrew Piper, Hajime Nakatani, Carrie Rentschler, Christine for their thoughtful and engaged responses. Ross, Jonathan Sterne, Will Straw, and Angela Vanhaelen. I would like to thank the AHRC, Royal Historical Society, Catherine Clinger, Nicholas Dew, Mary Hunter, and Stuart Society for the Study of French History, UCL History of Art MacMillan provided friendship, fun, food, and discussion and Department and Graduate School, the Fonds Québécois de made my time in Canada an absolute pleasure. Recherche sur la Société et la Culture, and the Faculty of Arts at

Frontmatter.indd 11 12/4/12 2:34 PM McGill University for funding my research at various stages. The rique de la Ville de Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, award of a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Centre National des Arts et Métiers, and Musée Français de la Foundation came at a pivotal time, personally and intellectually, Carte à Jouer at Issy-les-Moulineaux. I would like to reserve a and made possible the research and writing of a significant part special thank-you for Alain Chevalier, Véronique Despine, and of the manuscript, while an idyllic term as a Member of the Annick LeGall at the Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille. School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Without their facilitation of this marvelous and beautifully Princeton, facilitated its completion. I would like to thank both situated resource, this book would never have got off the ground. of these institutions and acknowledge the support of the My editor at Penn State University Press, Eleanor H. Herodotus Fund for making the latter fellowship possible. I am Goodman, has been wonderfully encouraging since day one, also very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and to and I have had numerous occasions to be grateful for her the College Art Association for the award of a Millard Meiss efficiency and wisdom as this project has progressed. I would Publication Grant that enabled the production of the book. also like to thank Jennifer Norton, Danny Bellett, and Kate The staffs of numerous institutions have been crucial to Woodford at Penn State University Press and Christine Hosler the research for this project, and I would like to recognize some and Julie Van Pelt of AHPI for expertly steering the book to of them here. In Britain: The British Library, British Museum, publication. Part of chapter 1 was published as “The Currency Institute of Historical Research, National Art Library, Warburg of Caricature in Revolutionary France” in The Efflorescence of Institute, Waddesdon Manor, the J. B. Morrell Library at the Caricature, 1759–1838, edited by Todd Porterfield (Ashgate, University of York, UCL Art Museum, and the University of 2010); a section of the final chapter appeared as “Trompe- London Library. In Canada: Richard Virr and Ann Marie l’Oeil and Trauma: Money and Memory After the Terror” in Holland at McGill University Rare Books and Special Collec- Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (2007); and an amended version tions, and the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec. In the of chapter 5 was published in The Art Bulletin 92, no. 3 (2010). United States: Julie Mellby at the Graphic Arts Collection, and I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these articles for the Firestone Library and Marquand Library at Princeton their permission to reproduce material here. University; the Historical Studies and Social Sciences Library, I dedicate this book to my small but perfectly formed Institute for Advanced Study; the Newberry Library, Chicago, family, with more love and gratitude than it is remotely and the Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, Cornell possible for me to express here. Not a word of this book could University Library. In France: Philippe de Carbonnières at the or would have been written without the love, support, and Musée Carnavalet, Alan Marshall at the Musée de l’Imprimerie inspiring example of my mother, Elizabeth Taws, or without in Lyon, and the staffs of the Archives Nationales, Archives de the love and companionship of Jo Applin, my first, last, and la Préfecture de Police, Archives de Paris, Bibliothèque Histo- always best reader.

xii | acknowledgments

Frontmatter.indd 12 12/4/12 2:34 PM ABBREVIATIONS

AN Archives Nationales, Paris AP Archives de Paris, Paris APP Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Paris BHVP Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, Paris BL British Library, London BM British Museum, London BN Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris MC Musée Carnavalet, Paris MNAM Musée National des Arts et Métiers, Paris MRF Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille

Frontmatter.indd 13 12/4/12 2:34 PM INTRODUCTION

Introduction.indd 14 11/28/12 11:35 AM At midday on 5 May 1793, a crowd gathered on the Place de la National Convention, and, in a reenactment of the demoli- Bastille in eastern Paris to observe a solemn and unmistakably tion on the same site in 1789, they were smashed to pieces revolutionary ritual. In front of several revolutionary legisla- beneath the “national hammer” by the same Palloy who had tors, hangers-on, and assorted observers, workers unearthed a put them in place the previous year.3 large wooden box that had been buried in the center of the Yet despite the iconoclastic rhetoric that governed this Bastille site less than a year earlier, on 14 July 1792, the third event and the ritualized erasure of the recent past it set in play, anniversary of the storming of the prison.1 Installed beneath a these objects were not simply destroyed.4 Instead, their bruised stone from the Bastille by the builder-entrepreneur Pierre- remains were piled back into the same cedar box and trans- François Palloy, the demolisher of the prison and a self-styled ported immediately to the National Archives, founded three “patriot,” the container comprised part of the foundation for a years previously, where they were placed under the guard of monument to liberty that was proposed for the site but that the chief archivist Armand Gaston Camus. Conspicuously but never, in fact, saw the light of day. The box functioned as a not irretrievably damaged, these obsolete fragments remain kind of time capsule, for it contained a motley assortment of there to this day.5 The Bastille site, on the other hand, objects, all of which provided material evidence of the remained empty, despite the hopes for a future characterized sweeping political and social changes brought about by the by the production and display of effective and enduring Revolution. Although it might be expected that these objects symbolic objects that were no doubt in the air that spring day were vestiges of the Ancien Régime, in fact few of them in 1793. It was not until 1840 that it received its permanent predated the Revolution itself, while those that did had been monument in the form of a column commemorating the remade as overtly revolutionary. Revolution of 1830.6 Included in Palloy’s box were an assignat, or paper banknote, of fifty livres and several coins of varying values; Revolutions are forced to do stuff with debris, to sort and four medals made from the chains of the Bastille, representing reframe not only the leftover remnants of the regimes they set the ci-devant king, his ministers, and the deputies of both the out to destroy but the outdated, embarrassing evidence of their National Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly; earlier selves.7 Becoming a revolutionary, to steal a phrase from and a copper-bound copy of the Constitution of 1791 (fig. 1). the historian Timothy Tackett, required the production, and In addition, a bronze plaque engraved with the Declaration of more pressingly, the reproduction, of things.8 This tale of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the Constitution, a revolutionary uncertainty regarding the Revolution’s historical portrait of Louis XVI (who had been executed on 21 January legacy was not an isolated incident but was typical of attempts 1793, just over three months before the box was unearthed) to use material objects to narrate and, more important, to carved into another Bastille stone, and effigies of the legislators actively constitute transformations in the temporal and political Jean-Sylvain Bailly and Claude-Emmanuel de Pastoret were order of 1790s France. Such responsiveness to the contingencies also packed into this underground casket.2 Following speeches of the historical process came to typify revolutionaries’ self- by the future consul Jean-Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and conscious performance of their unique situation in time. While the deputy Louis-Joseph Charlier, the politically outmoded it is tempting to read the exhumation of Palloy’s memory-box as contents of the container were excavated by order of the indicating the inability of its contents to secure the Revolution’s

Introduction.indd 1 11/28/12 11:35 AM 2 | the politics of the provisional

Introduction.indd 2 11/28/12 11:35 AM Figure 1 Constitution of 1791, damaged by P.-F. Palloy in May 1793. Copper and parchment. Archives Nationales de France, Paris, AE/I/9/4. Photo: Atelier Photographique des Archives Nationales

“meaning,” longevity is not the only way in which objects However, the radical destabilization of systems of acquire currency. Rather, this book will argue, visual practice in patronage and display that accompanied the momentous revolutionary France was characterized by the production and events of 1789 had engendered massive changes in the condi- circulation of a range of transitional, provisional, ephemeral, tions under which artists worked.9 Shortages of materials and and half-made images and objects, whose frequently uncertain, money, combined with a volatile political atmosphere, meant fleeting, or makeshift materiality paradoxically provided the that it was increasingly difficult for painters, sculptors, and most effective ongoing means of negotiating the historical architects to carry on as they had before the Revolution. significance of the Revolution. Durability was not easily achieved, and few large-scale artworks Occupying a nebulous space between, and overlapping or projects for lasting monuments were ever completed, with, the traditional prerogatives of divinely ordained king- although many were proposed. With some notable exceptions, ship and the new social order of nineteenth-century moder- the space was filled with the production of transient, ephem- nity, France in the 1790s was characterized by frequent shifts eral installations, often made for festivals or other revolution- in political authority and an embrace of the new that regularly ary commemorations, as well as a wide range of new kinds of ran up against a persistent desire, shared by revolutionaries of visual production that the Revolution had either initiated or all political orientations, to complete the Revolution. The transformed. These included the eclectic output of official and prospect of revolutionary permanence (if not “permanent nonofficial print publishers—calendars, almanacs, paper revolution”) was a difficult one to realize, the stabilization and money, identity cards, newspapers, bureaucratic vignettes, perpetuation of the Revolution requiring a delicate combina- laws, forms, caricatures, playing cards, portraits, songs, tion of stasis and ongoing incompletion. Throughout the topographies, and images of revolutionary events—alongside 1790s revolutionaries recognized the potential for art to numerous other souvenirs, relics, paintings, drawings, plans, negotiate this impasse, and the call for the production of clothing, and furniture. They provided multiple opportunities enduring monuments, paintings, and public spaces dedicated for artists and other cultural producers to work in newly to the memory of the Revolution came from all points on the straitened circumstances and, often, to experiment in a revolutionary political spectrum. This was often framed in manner that would not have been possible previously. terms of a perceived distance from the ephemeral displays, In portraying the Revolution as “a sort of lacuna, a deserted dissimulative feints, masquerades, and intrigues considered and sterile space for the history of art,” Antoine-­Chrysostome typical of both Ancien-Régime political culture more generally Quatremère de Quincy, the antiquarian and neo­classical theorist and the bourgeois art and elite luxury objects that dominated responsible for the conversion of the Panthéon, that monument the market in eighteenth-century France. to the persistence of memory, set the tone for the subsequent

introduction | 3

Introduction.indd 3 11/28/12 11:35 AM reception of much revolutionary visual practice.10 Although the was planned in full but that never took place because of the diversity of revolutionary art has long been recognized, a focus downfall of the political regime whose ideology of self-sacrifice on a few elite artists has contributed to the persistence of a it supported. David’s work exemplifies, perhaps more than any surprisingly tenacious set of assumptions about the indifferent other painting, the political stakes of provisionality in 1790s quality of revolutionary artistic practice or, worse, the Revolu- France. It demonstrates the extent to which constructions of tion’s status as an outright negation of art. With some notable subjectivity, gender, revolutionary politics, and artistic style and influential exceptions, art history has tended to isolate for were all subject, in different but overlapping ways, to the discussion a few key oeuvres from this period, privileging in unpredictable effects of the Revolution’s adamant forward particular the work of Jacques-Louis David and his students.11 drive. However, the belatedness of the painting, its fall into While I am aware of crucial differences in production and use, obsolescence before it had the opportunity to realize its my aim is not to reinforce the distinction between this kind of purpose, and its teetering position between utopian future and institutionally valorized art and the images and objects once revolutionary history only tell us part of the story of how described by Linda Nochlin as “an odd assortment of second- provisional images and objects could be more than the rate portraits [. . .] historiated toby jugs and indecipherable outmoded wreckage of discontinued political systems. coarse-grained prints.”12 On the contrary, in examining how Indeed, the vast majority of visual materials that revolutionaries attempted to reconfigure their understanding conveyed the Revolution’s symbolic message around France, of society, politics, and history via an engagement with the whether issued by the state or private interests, were mobile, mechanics of transience, it is crucial that we pay attention to ephemeral, and multiple. Despite the revolutionary desire for how demonstrably “artistic” works intersected with a diverse permanent monuments equal to those of Rome or Greece, it field of images conventionally understood to be outside the was assignats, passports, games, caricatures, certificates, sphere of art. posters, souvenirs, clothing, and engravings—precisely the David and other academic painters were also, undoubt- kind of things that made their way into Palloy’s container— edly, implicated in the politics of provisionality, and not just that played the greatest role in transmitting visually the in terms of a diversified practice that led to such artists message of the Revolution, although not always in ways that designing everything from playing cards and letterheads to were readily understood or easily managed by either their clothing, festivals, and theater sets during these years. Take, for producers or their multiple consumers. Added to these were instance, David’s 1794 painting of the child-martyr Joseph the rituals, performances, and impromptu spaces of display, Bara (fig. 2), a work that for reasons both intentional and exchange, and forgery, which were even more provisional in happenstance claims a middle ground between the past and nature. As the story of Palloy’s box on the site of the Bastille future, between two incompatible regimes, between male and shows, the visual culture of the Revolution could at various female, between childhood and adulthood, and between life points provide the bedrock for the historical imagination of and death.13 All of this is rendered in a feathery, irresolute the Revolution and at the same time be subject to radical and brushwork that breaks down into hazy formlessness at the regular revision. borders of the image, applied to a canvas that was intended to It is a central claim of this book that the temporary be paraded through the streets at a revolutionary festival that character of much of the Revolution’s material culture is not

4 | the politics of the provisional

Introduction.indd 4 11/28/12 11:35 AM Figure 2 Jacques-Louis David, La mort de Joseph Bara, 1794. Oil on canvas. Musée Calvet, Avignon, Inv. 846.3.1. Photo: Fondation Calvet

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Introduction.indd 5 11/28/12 11:35 AM best understood as a sign of the failure of revolutionaries to ness of their status as commodities. The currency of these produce images and objects of lasting importance. On the works, which was, in many cases, inseparable from their status contrary, it points to a dynamic, contradictory process of as currency, resided too in their ability to circulate—as experimentation that had profound implications for how reproduced items that could be owned, transmitted, or viewed revolutionaries became constructed as political subjects. by a critical mass of individuals—and in their potential to Widely reproduced, ephemeral, “in-between” images and operate as mediums of both change and exchange. objects made during the French Revolution were, I argue, a primary site for the formation of both individual subjectivities Rather than provide a comprehensive inventory of revolution- and wider national or political community identities, and they ary visual culture or long-since-vanished objects (an impos- were at the heart of debates on the nature of political authen- sible task in any case), The Politics of the Provisional is an ticity and historical memory. Usually, of course, permanence attempt to assess critically the visual politics of revolutionary was the desired outcome, of both revolutionary politics and France. The studies on which each chapter is based draw out visual production—witness the enthusiasm for a monument distinct and conflicting themes within the political and visual at the Bastille. However, the means by which permanence culture of the period, interrogating an archive that is layered, could be achieved were not straightforward and were regularly heterogeneous, and contradictory. For reasons of coherence I undermined by material, economic, and political constraints. have concentrated for the most part on images produced in As provisional images began to lose their meaning or value, or Paris, where the majority of existing images were produced, were recycled, destroyed, sequestered, or decommissioned, sold, or legislated for; although at several points this has been revolutionaries (and those with alternative political affilia- neither possible nor desirable, and I am conscious that Paris tions) were forced to think tactically about corporeal, political, does not stand for the Revolution as a whole. While ordered and material legitimacy and, in so doing, to consider their thematically rather than chronologically, the book focuses on relationship to the new ways of understanding time initiated a conventional “revolutionary decade” from 1789 to 1799, with by the Revolution. Thinking about material durability was one some porosity at either end, yet it goes without saying that the of the key ways in which revolutionaries thought about narrow historical frame provided by conventions of date duration, and it was consequently crucial to how they imag- limitation is, while seductive, potentially misleading. This is ined the place of the Revolution in history. all the more apparent in the context of a temporally complex In short, provisional images and objects had currency as process such as the French Revolution, whose origins are producers of meanings that played an active role in shaping found long before the storming of the Bastille and whose their world. Many of these works were explicitly “useful” significance expands well beyond it. objects, made for functional rather than overtly aesthetic ends. Despite the claims made for them by revolutionaries, Operating in the here and now of the political present, some almost all of the objects discussed in this book had significant were necessarily conceived as flexible and evolving, a means to precedents earlier in the eighteenth century, if not before. Few an end, while others came to be considered provisional only scholars would now subscribe to a reading of the French after their passing. These images and objects, most of which Revolution as a rupture so absolute that it obliterated all signs were produced in quantity, were often made in full conscious- of the recent past, and I certainly do not wish to lay claim to a

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Introduction.indd 6 11/28/12 11:35 AM reading of the Revolution as a fully autonomous, coherent France in the 1790s they took on a heightened significance as historical unit. Rather, the question of how revolutionaries the very substance of the Revolution. As much as any artwork, dealt with continuities, both from the previous regime and these objects deserve examination in the historically specific from earlier moments in the history of the Revolution, is at context of their production and use. the core of this book. However, alongside these broader historical shifts, it is essential that we acknowledge the specific While the provisional has been frequently taken to stand for temporalities of the works under discussion. Material objects the degraded ephemerality of the Ancien Régime—not least are complex things that have histories of their own. Even the during the Revolution itself—since the early nineteenth most transient, fragile objects tend to stick around for some century it has also signified the effervescent transience of a time. In fact—and this paradox is at the heart of any analysis modernity the Revolution arguably brought to realization. of the “ephemeral”—these objects that fall apart or are Over a decade before Victor Hugo’s fictional description of destroyed in great numbers often turn out to be as durable as how “in the provisional France made the eternal,” Charles their ostensibly more secure counterparts, for they are Baudelaire had conceptualized modernity, in his famous essay amenable to preservation in both personal collections and on Constantin Guys, as “the transitory, the fugitive, the state archives.14 contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and In many cases, the objects I discuss—money, identity the immutable.”15 Baudelaire began this essay with a reflection documents, and festivals, for instance—all became more on how the work of Philibert-Louis Debucourt, an artist formalized in the Napoleonic period than during the First discussed at length in chapter 5, was particular to its historical Republic, increasing in worldwide importance with the rise of moment. By 1863 Debucourt’s work was interesting to industrial capitalism and the nineteenth century’s cycle of Baudelaire precisely because of its “pastness,” much as modern revolutions. None of this would have been possible, however, art was of value for its “essential quality of being present.”16 Yet without the first French Revolution’s eagerness to “regenerate” although the dialectical character of modernity that Baudelaire its symbolic language and all areas of administration, art, and outlined certainly seems to speak to the works under discus- ritual. Producers of revolutionary images may have drawn sion here, we have good reason to be cautious of simplistic upon long-standing visual traditions when making their readings of the Revolution’s modernity. Indeed, it is crucial to works, but that does not mean these images were mere recognize that despite a widespread contemporary recognition recapitulations of all that had gone before. Continuities yes, of the Revolution’s unprecedented breach with the past, its but ruptures too. Paper money may have preceded the aftereffects were often not anticipated by those responsible for Revolution, but the assignat was something quite new. A long it, newly politicized subjects whose expectations, ideas, and tradition of royal and religious festivals undoubtedly informed forms of expression were those of the eighteenth century. revolutionary festivals, but not one of them commemorated a Nonetheless, the Revolution did transform inexorably the revolution. Ex-votos and relics were medieval in origin, but relation between made things and the political field, not least Palloy’s Bastille relics were singular to their historical moment. because, as Richard Wrigley has astutely observed in his study Almost every culture in history has had its fair share of of revolutionary dress, it marked an ill-defined crossroads transient, interim, or speculative images and objects, but in between a world where nothing was thrown away and a world

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Introduction.indd 7 11/28/12 11:35 AM of modern consumerism where obsolescence, transience, and straightforward nor uncontested. While the production of disposal were intrinsic to the status of the object.17 images in large quantities by the revolutionary legislature gives Consequently, each chapter of this book figures as a us a good idea of what successive governments desired to make conjuncture where a set of images comes into focus, often known or change in the French people, at points it also allows from a mass of similar or related images. Indeed, in many us access to how people responded to the revolutionary state cases, the very excess of these images has paradoxically limited and what they recognized or subverted in the images made in their visibility as objects of study. Received as either functional their name. Forging and folding, attaching and adapting, objects outside the terrain of “art” or as art objects that address collecting and carrying, remodeling and renaming were all transient subject matter, these images are susceptible to a banal strategies by which citizens could transform the function and marginalization as “ephemera.” Yet these normative, unitary appearance of the images and objects they encountered. categories of “revolutionary visual culture” or “ephemeral image” Carefully scratching the ink away from the paper of a letter- have failed to account for the interactions between such forms head to reflect a change in political authority—in one of representation and other more established media and example, issued at Nevers in messidor year III, “la mort” has genres, from Academic history painting to sculpture or been replaced by “la justice,” while “imperisable” has been architecture. Moreover, as indexes of a political field that was crossed out altogether (fig. 3)—may have prolonged the itself far from stable, these images remind us too that binary existence and utility of the document, but it also exposed how separations between “revolutionary” and “counterrevolution- works could change over time and recorded the interaction ary” image making are limited in their usefulness, as such between individuals and images. By engaging with visual positions were far from fixed and were the product of pro- culture, public spectacles, private entertainments, or state cesses of struggle and appropriation between politically varied bureaucracy, revolutionaries of all convictions situated and inharmonious groups. This book works from an assump- themselves in relation to revolutionary politics. This had a tion that any history of revolutionary visual culture demands a historical dimension that was apparent from the start of the reading of counterrevolutionary visual production, and that Revolution but that intensified as it progressed and that the two were at all points mutually constitutive categories. exceeded the boundaries of France itself, as colonial subjects What is at stake here is a politics of the provisional that also occupied a critical stance with regard to the images and is less about tracking shifting allegiances on a neat spectrum objects of the metropolitan Revolution. between royalist and Jacobin than it is about visuality itself as It is perhaps unsurprising then that historians have, with a form of political praxis. Despite the ostensible marginality of some notable exceptions, sometimes been more willing than much of the material dealt with here, many of the images in art historians have been to engage with this diverse body of the chapters that follow were produced by the state or were material, although their focus has for the most part leaned images that responded to or reflected administrative transfor- toward printed images representing prominent revolutionary mations of the political structure. Recognizing the power episodes or symbols. There has also been a tendency among dynamics and genre hierarchies of so-called ephemeral works some historians to use images as illustrations of event- or allows us to complicate notions of “high” and “low” in artistic value-based narratives rather than addressing the role of practice. However, the reception of such images was neither images in the construction of those narratives. However, Lynn

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Introduction.indd 8 11/28/12 11:35 AM Figure 3 Letterhead, le directoire du département de la Nièvre à la commission des administrations civiles, police et tribunaux, 1795. Engraving and typography with manuscript additions. Archives Nationales de France, Paris, AN F7 3494. Photo: author

Hunt, writing in a fall 2009 issue of French Historical Studies casts a wider net than the printed material that has been the that reflected on the state of revolutionary studies twenty years primary focus of much important work conducted by scholars on from the bicentennial (a time when many important including Hunt, Claudette Hould, Joan Landes, Rolf Reich- publications and exhibitions appeared), argues that the study ardt, and Hubertus Kohle, arguing instead that the precarious- of images may be one of the most productive future directions ness of representation in revolutionary France was constituted in French revolutionary studies, as it might provide us with on an intermedial field of exchange between a range of ways of understanding how “people came quite literally to see different kinds of objects and images.19 the world differently.”18 In particular, Hunt suggests we The book begins with an analysis of the revolutionary develop new ways of thinking about subjectivity and the social assignat. A bond based on the value of “reclaimed” clerical through the examination of multiple rather than individual land, the assignat operated as a national currency until 1796. images. With that in mind, this book attempts to provide a set Situating the assignat against other forms of visual production, of criteria for thinking about the visual culture of revolution- from caricature to history painting, as well as the counterfeits ary France that moves beyond what it represented into issues that challenged its authority, I examine how the materiality of of how it represented and what that representation made the paper notes proved a testing ground for the authenticity of possible (or impossible). In doing so, this book necessarily other kinds of representation. Considerations of this sort had

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Introduction.indd 9 11/28/12 11:35 AM an effect on subjects as well as objects, and in chapter 2 I court’s Almanach national in 1790) and the remembrance of a examine the precarious interactions between citizens and their revolution past (the representation of assignats in 1796 and printed papers. Focusing on passports, certificates, and other 1804). Images such as these demonstrate the extent to which documents, I investigate the ways in which they articulated past, present, and future were not mutually exclusive catego- belonging and exclusion, often understood in terms of ries in 1790s France but frequently intersected with one evolving racial, gendered, or class-based typologies. another and often did so within the same image. The theme of mobility is developed further in chapters 3 The Politics of the Provisional sets out to mediate these and 4, which also explore differences between provisionality in antagonistic positions, examining how, short on time and two or three dimensions. Chapter 3 examines prints represent- money, revolutionary artists and legislators developed ad hoc, ing the first Festival of the Federation, held in Paris on 14 July tactical forms of provisional representation that provided new 1790. Printed images provided a means of negotiating the ways of imagining and performing political agency. The problematic destruction or recommissioning of the ephemeral Revolution’s evident historical tensions can illuminate our structures erected for the festival and a way of rendering understanding of revolutionary visual culture, but this visual permanent the performative, mobile aspect of the event. culture also sheds light on the historical process itself. In Chapter 4 focuses on Palloy’s transformation of the ruins of the looking at how the people of the Revolution “saw things,” we Bastille, in particular his production of souvenir objects recast have often ignored the objects that made them most aware, on a in the shape of the prison. These troubling objects engage daily basis, of the ambiguities presented by the visual and of head-on with the issue of revolutionary time, the subject of their own precarious positions as spectators. Thinking seriously chapter 5, which concentrates on revolutionary calendars and about revolutionary visual culture demands that we engage with almanacs, in particular a single color print by Philibert-Louis the rich variety of things made to be seen that did not explicitly Debucourt. Chapter 6 returns to the assignat and a series of reference locatable, identifiable revolutionary events and trompe l’oeil prints published in the aftermath of the notes’ themes, providing comfortable “illustration” for the historical destruction in 1796, many of which contained hidden silhou- narrative, but that we think too about the contingent, the ette profiles of the executed royal family or prominent revolu- multiple, the marginal, and the central, the nonfigurative, tionaries in the negative space surrounding other objects. I nonart, nonrevolutionary. How, we must ask, did authentic argue that these images, which track a history of the Revolution “revolutionariness” develop through the appropriation of through its paper traces, are a response to revolutionary trauma, prerevolutionary material? How was visual culture, in its and consider how motifs of ruin, chance, and dissimulation broadest sense, implicated in what it meant to be “postrevolu- permeated postrevolutionary discourse. tionary,” as far as such a term may be thought to be meaningful? The final two chapters engage most explicitly with In revolutionary France, we know, everything was rethought— processes of historical imagining and recollection, prediction viewed through the lens of the Revolution, all aspects of life and recall, and are characterized by an effacement of these were reimagined, and even familiar objects and practices differences in trompe l’oeil and other illusionistic techniques, acquired new resonances. Given this temporal (not to mention where the blurring of material and temporal boundaries political) instability, how could revolutionaries tell the differ- organized both the promise of a revolution to come (Debu- ence between what was “true” and what was “false”?

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Introduction.indd 10 11/28/12 11:35 AM Authenticity and its close counterpart, transparency, instances and challenging them elsewhere. These images and became terms of increasing significance for people, ideas, and objects, at once asserting truth claims through repetition and things in 1790s France, although their meanings were far from undoing them by their unfixed relationship to a single stable, for they required recourse to criteria, inherited from the standard of legitimacy, soon became so much outmoded, past, that were no longer available or useful. Reproductive curious debris, yet they materialized the radical reformulation media in particular—but not only prints—worked to broker of time the Revolution had engendered and pointed toward the relationship between the past, present, and future, new ways of imagining the future. securing the authority of new concepts and practices in some

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Introduction.indd 11 11/28/12 11:35 AM CHAPTER ONE

MADE OF MONEY

TRANSPARENT BODIES, AUTHENTIC VALUES, PAPER SIGNS

Chap 01.indd 12 11/28/12 11:36 AM In France at the end of the eighteenth century, few objects assignats was sabotaged by prints that satirized paper money, articulated so vividly the Revolution’s uneasy position with images whose unsteady engagement with the representative regard to its own permanence as the assignat, a government problems posed by the assignat forms the main subject of this bond based on nationalized clerical land that subsequently chapter. Challenges such as these encouraged a sustained became a revolutionary paper currency. First issued in 1789, scrutiny of the material appearance of the assignat. Covered the assignat lasted for just over six years until, after cata- with a sometimes bewildering range of visual and textual strophic hyperinflation and eventual withdrawal, the notes information, assignats were made to be looked at—to be held were destroyed on the ci-devant Place Vendôme in February up to the light and pored over. Sometimes, as with one twenty- 1796, along with the technology used for their production. five sols note from 1792, which featured a prominent, radiating The introduction of the assignat had provided the revolution- eye at the top, they even looked straight back (fig. 4).3 ary state with a means to stabilize a precarious financial At the ceremony marking the assignat’s destruction, situation and, less directly, to transmit the Revolution’s Minister of Finances Ramel-Nogaret claimed that “the shifting iconography throughout France. As an object that in assignats made the Revolution. They brought about the due course made apparent the transfer of authority from royal destruction of orders and of privileges, they overturned the to Republican power, via the removal of the king’s profile and throne and founded the Republic.”4 Although his hyperbolic its replacement with a wide variety of Republican signs, the eulogy smacked of political spin, it pointed nonetheless to the assignat bore a great deal of symbolic as well as economic very real historical agency of the assignat. As early as 1792, capital. Despite its apparent transience, it was probably the Louis-Sébastien Mercier had similarly recognized the impor- most widely circulated image of the revolutionary period, tance of the confiscation of church properties, noting how issued in such vast quantities that publishers of books and “this unique resource consolidated the power of the National other printed materials were severely compromised by the lack Assembly, in that it destroyed the hopes of those who desired of available paper.1 its dissolution in order to perpetuate the Ancien Régime and However, for much of their short existence assignats its abuses.”5 On 2 November 1789, interpreting in its favor struggled to sustain equivalence with metal coinage, and they article seventeen of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of were regularly criticized for their material fragility in compari- the Citizen, which held that “the right to property being son to more solid signs of value. The assignat was a symptom— inviolable and sacred, no one ought to be deprived of it, and, for some, a primary cause—of the failure of the French except where public necessity, legally determined, clearly revolutionary economy.2 The authority of the assignat was demands it,” the National Assembly decreed that “all the undermined by its status as ephemeral printed paper, and from ecclesiastical properties are at the nation’s disposal,” a move the time of its introduction the Revolution’s enemies considered that paved the way for the issue of paper money.6 Church the assignat’s insubstantiality a reflection on the political lands represented almost a third of France and, although their transience of the Revolution itself. The instability of the actual value has been disputed, it is clear that they provided an assignat was exacerbated by endemic counterfeiting, especially immediate and substantial source of capital for the nascent from abroad, that rendered all paper notes suspect. Less revolutionary government. Initially conceived as a temporary ruinously but equally important, the symbolic worth of measure, the assignat was an interest-bearing bond that was

Chap 01.indd 13 11/28/12 11:36 AM supposed to be withdrawn in 1791 after the first sales of munes, patriotic associations, and other payment bodies were national properties had raised enough for the revolutionary forced to compensate individuals by other means.10 The billets Caisse de l’Extraordinaire—an institution set up in December de confiancethat resulted were to be directly exchangeable for 1789 to issue assignats and manage the sale of church lands— assignats upon their arrival. Although a date limit on the to repay the short-term loan owed by the government to the validity of these notes was set at 1 January 1793, it was repeatedly Caisse d’Escompte, the bank founded by Necker and Turgot extended, and they remained in use until the start of year IV, in 1776.7 This circulation of arrears anticipated the corre- shortly before the withdrawal of the assignat.11 sponding shift from clerical or aristocratic authority to Thebillets de confiance add a further layer of hybridity to revolutionary sovereignty. Accompanied by diverse billets de the singular designation “assignat.” Maurice Muszynski confiance (promissory notes issued by employers and other estimates that fifty-five hundred different billets were issued in authorities to make up for an initial shortage of printed fifteen hundred communes between 1790 and 1793, a credible assignats), the notes became essential to the economic survival figure given the broad array of sources from which they and political consciousness of the Revolution, and in April issued.12 The billets were printed on a variety of supports, 1790 they became an official national currency. usually card or paper of varying colors. Playing cards were Not all responses to the introduction of assignats and often used for this purpose, a traditional promise of payment subsequent large issues of ever-smaller denominations were as adapted to new circumstances. As their production was not favorable as those of Ramel-Nogaret and Mercier. The bad subject to legislative interference, billets de confiance appeared memory of John Law’s ill-fated bank, based on a paper money in a wide range of designs, often carrying the manuscript scheme, resurfaced noisily in the claims of anti-assignat addition of the bearer’s name or the issuing authority. The politicians and pamphleteers, who mocked the flimsy materi- billets were commonly horizontal in design, organized within a ality of the notes as a sign of their seemingly inevitable border that could be extremely simple or, in emulation of the economic precariousness. The psychological inheritance of assignats that were to follow, ornately complex, with many Law’s disastrous release of paper money in 1716 and the stages in between (fig. 5). Revolutionary symbolism—liberty collapse of the Mississippi Bubble in 1720 seemed to provide a caps, fasces, cockerels of vigilance, and slogans or songs from premonition of the depreciation that was to await the assig- popular culture, such as “ça ira”—appeared sporadically on nat.8 In the 1790s there are accounts of Law’s failed banknotes the notes, while others highlighted the site of issue.13 The found attached to primitive pillories in rural areas, an indica- variety of titles given to these notes also led to some confusion, tion of the anthropomorphic potential of money but also, for traditional bons (paper notes issued by merchants to make more particularly, of the reproach and suspicion with which up for a shortage in small change) appeared alongside mandats paper money continued to be held in France.9 (government-issued payment), a term that was to gain a This perceived lack of stability was not helped by repeated specific currency of its own following the withdrawal of the delays in the printing of new assignats, brought about by the assignats and their replacement by a new type of paper note, increasingly massive quantities of notes required and, in the mandat territorial, in the year IV. Given such diversity and response to counterfeiting, the complicated group effort of their a lack of control over their reception or verification, these assemblage. This meant that employers, départements, com- billets were susceptible to counterfeiting, which, ironically,

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Chap 01.indd 14 11/28/12 11:36 AM enhanced their lack of uniformity, as issuing authorities sought to make their notes more complex. Thebillets de confianceindicate the potential problems raised by the Revolution’s practice of material substitution. Standing in for the assignat, which itself stood for a piece of nationalized land, they demonstrated the variability of the Revolution’s visual output and the extent to which images issued by the state might coincide with more demotic forms of visual production. This fusion was rarely acknowledged by revolutionary rhetoric on the subject, especially the numerous laws that determined the historical narrative of the assignat with such apparent finality. The assignat, understood as a heteroge- neous, problematic field of interrelated images, was inevitably subject to contestation; its authority conceived and received in

visual terms, it came to be considered either a representation of Figure 4 Jean-Pierre Droz, assignat, a transformed and transparent polity or an insubstantial, twenty-five sols, 1792. Etching, engraving, and typography on paper. transient symbol of a chaotic and violent episode. Private collection. Photo: author Each assignat issued required a different design, Figure 5 Billet de vingt sols, municipalité although the formal variation to which the notes were de Laval, département de la Mayenne, 1791. subjected disguised certain features common to all. Roughly Etching on paper. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1988.227. Photo © rectangular pieces of paper of varying dimensions and quality, Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/ assignats generally conformed to a basic scheme: a printed Domaine de Vizille

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Chap 01.indd 15 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 6 Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux, assignat (illuminated from beneath to show “La Nation” watermark), fifteen sous, 1792. Etching, engraving, and typography on watermarked paper. Private collection. Photo: author

frame or border enclosing a blank space in which were stamps in particular) worked directly on and within the body arranged a fluctuating series of signs indicating value and of the assignat (fig. 6). legitimacy. At various times these signs included either one or While there was resistance to the use of assignats—cases two royal portraits; a signature, either manuscript or printed; a such as that of the priest Pierre Bal, imprisoned for six months mechanically generated number; a date of issue in either the in 1794 and fined three thousand livres for refusing to accept Gregorian or the Republican calendar, sometimes both; a assignats as payment, were not uncommon—the visual watermark; a “dry” or embossed inkless stamp (timbre sec); an characteristics of the assignats were subject to regular inspec- “identical” stamp (timbre identique), reproduced in the same tion by enormous numbers of French people.16 For Edmund place on the verso side; diverse Republican insignia; and the Burke, the forced use of assignats was intimately linked to the ever-present warning “the law punishes the counterfeiter with material facture of the paper notes, for “even the clergy are to death/the nation rewards the informer.”14 The aesthetic of the receive their miserable allowance out of the depreciated paper, border of the assignat ran from a pared-down classicism to a which is stamped with the indelible character of sacrilege, and more overtly decorative effect. This frame provided a structure with the symbols of their own ruin.”17 The assignat was, first for further signs, from fleurs-de-lys to fasces, Henri IV to and foremost, a representation: of metal currency, of Hercules.15 Furthermore, every assignat acted as a repository of “reclaimed” church and aristocratic land, but also of the printing techniques, combining a variety of approaches from radical political transformation on which the mutation of land standard copper engraving to more subtle means of identify- into paper sign was based. The initial sale of land had con- ing a note’s genuineness, many of which (watermarks and dry flated economic necessity and symbolic gesture to allow any

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Chap 01.indd 16 11/28/12 11:36 AM citizen the right to circulate a piece of their regenerated nation been subordinated to their economic role.20 However, in order in paper form, and from the outset the cultural and political to consider fully the extent to which the assignat was bound up potential of paper money was recognized alongside its with the struggle for the Revolution’s survival, it is necessary to economic value. Later projects to transform the church bells take its materiality seriously, as producing certain ways of of France into coins that could be used in exchange for small thinking about the Revolution’s transformation of time, as denomination assignats rearticulated this symbolic appropria- participating in a social relationship with revolutionary tion in the guise of financial compulsion.18 Despite the subjects, and as engaging in a critical conversation with diversity in its official production and the instability engen- conventional forms of artistic representation.21 dered by its illegal reproduction, the assignat was, I suggest, the ground against which most other forms of representation and their respective claims to authenticity were judged for The Currency of Counterrevolution much of the 1790s. In revolutionary France the breakdown of traditional systems In spite of prohibitions against their representation, of patronage and display and the incentive to produce art that assignats also found their way into a wide variety of images, referenced an ever-changing political scene meant that the both “revolutionary” and “counterrevolutionary” in intent and production of established genres for the exhibition of state of diverse genre and media, from history paintings to printed power—history painting, monuments, and architecture in caricatures. In its various guises as both subject and object of particular—was difficult and often altogether impossible. representation, the assignat—“the major emblem of the Print culture, on the other hand, flourished, although it was Revolution,” in the words of one historian—was subjected to not, in its self-consciously “artistic” forms, systematically an intense, politically motivated gaze, which, through its exploited by revolutionary legislators, for they were largely mobilization of bodily metaphor and by virtue of its position at suspicious of the dissembling potential of signs. These the heart of contemporary debates about political legitimacy, prints—particularly satirical etchings and engravings—­ played an important role in the construction of both revolu- provided one of the key sites where the image of the assignat tionary and counterrevolutionary ideologies.19 Furthermore, a was mediated and often undermined. Caricatures, whose range of more subtle motivations existed between these swiftness of production and concentration on the grotesque reductive binaries of revolutionary engagement, articulated via debasement of the body could not be easily reconciled with the the conditions of the assignat’s production and use, as well as in idealizing rhetoric of Republican culture, were not employed as its subsequent representation. The visuality of the assignat and state-sponsored propaganda until 1794, although print entre- its crucial currency in the Revolution traverse the relationship preneurs and groups with more explicit political affiliations had between its own status as an image and its function as a circulated them unofficially in large quantities since 1789. component of other images. Rarely assessed by art historians, Caricature proliferated during the Revolution, but its spread and then typically in terms of either the artistic value of stamps was uneven and the ease with which it could be produced and engraved by the likes of Dupré, Tardieu, or Gatteaux or in sold varied according to the political regime in power.22 relation to the technical complexities of their production alone, This burgeoning market in caricatures regularly worked the material and visual qualities of printed paper notes have against the Revolution, in the form of royalist prints that were

made of money | 17

Chap 01.indd 17 11/28/12 11:36 AM overtly antithetical to its aims. The production of these ture, an art form centered on the image in transition, merely caricatures, which were mostly anonymous, flourished for a destabilizing the official image of the revolutionary state put short period in the ten months prior to the fall of the monar- forward by the assignat. Rather, these works demonstrated how chy in August 1792, although counterrevolutionaries as well as the relationship between caricature and its subjects was revolutionaries had been slow to exploit the propagandistic precarious and variable, and that nonofficial imagery of this potential of caricature. Adopting as their main themes the kind was engaged in a dialogue with its official counterparts financial situation, the revolutionary attack on the clergy, and that put the meaning of both under pressure. the preparations for impending war, these royalist prints took Most obviously, the bond between counterrevolutionary advantage of caricature’s ability to demean its subjects, caricature and the assignat was made more ambiguous by the exposing the rational and noble ambitions of the Revolution fact that until 1792 the assignat functioned as a form of as absurdly flawed. The extent to which assignats infiltrated miniature portrait, featuring at its center a prominent profile the caricatural repertoire is made arrestingly apparent in an of Louis XVI. Between 1790 and 1795 Louis’s effigy appeared anonymous German etching of 1793 (fig. 7). This print on twenty-three of the fifty-two assignats issued, often directly appropriates the “French” half of James Gillray’s 1792 supplemented by miniature representations of the great anti-revolutionary contrast print French Liberty, British French kings—Henri IV, Saint Louis—from whom his Slavery, representing a starving sans-culotte eulogizing his inherited power derived.23 Until the foundation of the “land of milk and honey,” and juxtaposes it with a hallucina- Republic and the subsequent removal of the king’s head in tory image of an oversized five livres assignat, a paper obsidi- both reality and representation, the king’s body-as-print onal note issued during the siege of Mayence, and a trail of remained the most explicit signifier of authenticity available to metal coins. An image of the French produced for a German the assignat, even though it was often derived from prerevolu- audience via the work of a British artist, this work speaks to tionary representations of royal power. Counterrevolutionary the confluence of caricature and paper money across interna- caricature, which represented these notes, was paradoxically tional borders, and it unequivocally locates the assignat as defined by its closeness to, not difference from, official central to discourses of consumption, dearth, and bodily portraiture as mediated by revolutionary image-makers. decrepitude in revolutionary France. Complicating the counterrevolutionary response to From the beginning of the Revolution, the assignat was revolutionary signs, as the Revolution progressed the portrait one of the favorite topics of counterrevolutionary caricature. of the king posed a threat to the political and material Using the perceived transience and potential falsity of the legitimacy of the assignat. As elsewhere, revolutionaries were assignat to mock the instability of revolutionary politics and the forced to ask what new sign or signs could replace the sym- venality of the Revolution’s principal figures, these single-sheet bolic and emotional currency of the king’s image. These prints called into question the credibility of revolutionary debates were particularly pressing in the case of the assignat, claims to political, financial, and material value and posited where the value of money was inseparable from the royal paper money as dangerous to the health of the nation. How- profile, which recalled older and more secure units of ever, a closer examination of these prints shows that caricature exchange. We might read the uncertainty around this issue as and assignat were not simply antithetical images, with carica- a fulfillment of Burke’s prophecy that the assignat would never

18 | the politics of the provisional

Chap 01.indd 18 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 7 O Sacre Dieu—uns bekomm bien die Liberte-Welch ein Wollöben! Es fleust der Milk und die Hönick! Ah ça ira!, ca. 1793. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

be able to confront the signifying power of metal coinage on body could be shown to be as ephemeral as the technological its own terms.24 Yet the decline of the coin, whose iconography guarantee of the assignat. was a traditional site for the material expression of absolute Accordingly, the visual arrangement of the assignat sovereignty, also spoke to the demise of royal authority, became an increasingly dialectical site for the mediation of symbolically rendered paper-thin. The inkless imprint (timbre revolutionary or Ancien-Régime politics. A twenty-five sols sec) and watermark may not have had the symbolic weight of note from 1792 (see fig. 4) demonstrates this ambivalent metal coinage; however, they furnished the assignat with an conflation of symbols at a crucial point of departure. Topped by unprecedented and specifically revolutionary political agency. an eye of surveillance from which a scrolled anticounterfeiting This came at a potential cost to the financial authority of paper warning unfurls, this assignat features two circular blanks currency—yet paradoxically, from late 1792, by purposefully printed to accommodate stamps. The imprint on the right- reducing royal involvement on the surface of the assignat to a hand side features a representation of a beehive, inscribed diaphanous afterimage, royal participation in the national “Republique Française, 21 septembre 1792,” the date of the

made of money | 19

Chap 01.indd 19 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 8 Bon de cinquante livres; Dieu et le Roi, 1793. Etching, engraving, and typography in green ink on paper. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Figure 9 Assignat of five francs folded in the manner of the Vendéens and the Chouans to read “la mort de la République,” ca. 1794. Folded assignat mounted on paper. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

proclamation of the Republic. In the center a gallic cockerel, February 1793, the Vendéen royalists asserted the legitimacy of symbolizing vigilance, raises a banner marked “la liberté ou la Bourbon rule by inserting an image of “Louis XVII” at the mort.” In every sense this note appears to bear testimony to the center of a received sign of value. The use of a paper note to allegorical schema of the Republic. However, a closer look disseminate this image demonstrates the ubiquity and reveals inconsistencies. Each corner of the minimally patterned versatility of the assignat as a focus of either political integrity border features a royalist fleur-de-lys, while the stamp on the or opprobrium; even though the connotative association left-hand side retains the royal imprint. Although the issue of between the assignat and the Revolution was very strong, the this note was announced by a law of 4 January 1792, it was in perception of its mutability clearly encouraged experimenta- fact released on 21 September, but it was not able to accommo- tion with its form. date fully the momentous changes that occurred that day. Stuck When a town was captured by the counterrevolutionary between two no longer compatible regimes, this compound, armies, its bank and the supply of assignats it contained were dialogic iconography represents a moment of crisis before the destroyed and replaced with their royalist equivalents. The reimposition of order, a political struggle for control of the impact of this act of defiance was amplified by basing the value image fought on the surface of the national currency. of the notes on that of Republican assignats, thereby reclaim- Perhaps inevitably, in 1793 and 1794 the forces of the ing, symbolically, the value of the land taken by the Revolu- Royal and Catholic Army fighting Republican troops in the tion, even as the existence of true assignats “à face royale” was bloody wars of the Vendée appropriated the form of the tacitly approved by this maneuver. On 15 brumaire year II (5 assignat as a symbol of counterrevolutionary resistance. November 1793), the Convention decreed that distributors of Diverse bons in the name of the king were issued, while notes these royalist “assignats” should be subject to the same featuring the profile of the dauphin Louis-Charles (that most stringent penalties as producers of counterfeits. Yet little could provisional of royal figures) alongside prominent fleurs-de-lys be done when the image in question was in fact a genuine were circulated in expectation of eventual victory (fig. 8).25 piece of currency: in 1794 both Vendéen royalists and Chouan Rejecting the anticlericalism of the Civil Constitution of the rebels in Brittany and Maine are reported to have used cleverly Clergy and the forced conscription of the levée en masse in folded assignats as a means of identifying themselves to one

20 | the politics of the provisional

Chap 01.indd 20 11/28/12 11:36 AM another (fig. 9). As one remarkable image shows, a neat piece The Body of Caricature of origami on a five livres assignat quickly turned the Republi- Such manipulations of the assignat would likely not have been so can slogan of “liberté, egalité, fraternité ou la mort” against immediately meaningful nor so effective were the transgressive itself—“la mort de la République” reads the message hidden possibilities of paper money not already established in the in plain sight at the center of this intelligently improvised counterrevolutionary satire of the early 1790s. One print, an identity card. anonymous caricature known as L’homme aux assignats (fig. 10),

made of money | 21

Chap 01.indd 21 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 10 L’homme aux assignats, 1791. Engraving and aquatint. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Photo: Library of Congress

offered an early response to the revolutionary assault on the royal Issued in November 1791 by the counterrevolutionary body politic. Encapsulating the malleability of the assignat at this publisher Michel Wébert, L’homme aux assignats ridicules the point, it provides a particularly useful case study with which to institutional abuse of a newly issued five livres assignat and evaluate the success of the caricatural denigration of revolution- condemns the management of French finances since 1789.26 ary paper money and to examine the competing claims to This print was very successful and it served as a model for truthfulness of both assignat and caricature, for both money and many subsequent caricatures. The influence of its image of a satire promised an undisguised, transparent authenticity, even if corrupt paper body could still be discerned six years later, in distortion, artifice, or fraud always hovered close by. an anonymous French etching, La Bourse protège les agioteurs

22 | the politics of the provisional

Chap 01.indd 22 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 11 La Bourse protège les agioteurs, ca. 1797. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

(fig. 11), in which a female “Bourse” (stock exchange) clad in a suggesting that the archival documents that comprised its voluminous skirt of mandats territoriaux protects a group of political legacy were as ephemeral as paper money.28 At the devious speculators. Claude Langlois has described how the center of the image is the improbable figure of Armand publication of L’homme aux assignats was a unique develop- Gaston Camus, the first director of the Archives, who was ment in counterrevolutionary caricature, marking a shift from ridiculed habitually in the counterrevolutionary press for his book-based to single-sheet publication.27 This transition was role in the first release of assignats, for his contribution to significant, as it defined the point at which counterrevolution- drafting the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and for his ary caricature could be said to have achieved a new autonomy proposals for the reduction of the civil list.29 Grandly emerging as a valuable form of political critique. from a crowd of revolutionary malefactors, Camus engages the The scene is set in the Archives Nationales, where the viewer with a solemn gaze that makes his sartorial eccentricity formes and matrices used to make assignats were stored in appear all the more absurd.30 As the counterrevolutionary conditions of maximum security. By locating the image in the journalist Boyer de Nîmes observed, Camus’s grave, self-satis- Archives, the anonymous author of L’homme aux assignats fied demeanor is rendered hilarious by its radical contrast with invoked the technical production of the assignat as a sign of its his clothing, for in this caricature, Camus’s dress, including his opacity and secret manipulation, rather than the politically hair, is composed of assignats of various denominations.31 The inflected transparency claimed by revolutionaries. What is revolutionary figures surrounding him are attempting, with more, they devalued the Revolution’s official memory by little resistance, to relieve him of his paper suit. Barnave is

made of money | 23

Chap 01.indd 23 11/28/12 11:36 AM receiving a large sum of money to cover gambling debts. The écorché. However, the most explicit reference is to John Law. bespectacled Le Chapelier—whose own costume and attri- This is indicated by Camus’s anachronistic dress and hairstyle, butes reference biribi, a popular but highly speculative game while his portrait as a whole is adapted from Leonard and of risk he was incorrectly credited with having invented— Pieter Schenck’s portrait of Law, published shortly before the sneaks a note from Camus’s coat, as does Brissot, on bended implosion of his scheme in 1720 (fig. 12). The “immediate knee.32 In the background, Charles Lameth, Abbé Fauchet, present” of counterrevolutionary caricature was clearly not Dom Mulot, Chabot, and Pastoret scrap for fragments of the inconsistent with a pronounced historical awareness. The archivist’s fragile garments, which are disintegrating rapidly to staging of Camus in relation to this portrait of Law in reveal an undetermined surface. To paraphrase Marx, “circula- L’homme aux assignats implies that he is similarly positioned in tion,” in this case of a transgressive nature, “sweats money anticipation of an impending economic meltdown. It further from every pore.”33 exposes the sophisticated ways in which conventional portrai- Yet while the bodies of the characters in L’homme aux ture was made to intersect with the practice of caricature assignats allow for a wide range of comic possibilities, the facial during this period. features of the revolutionaries represented in this print are not Camus appeared frequently in such prints, as a combi- exaggerated or distorted as one might expect. Unlike the nation of anticlericalism, assignats, and comic effect concen- grotesque, dissimulative, and absurd aristocrats and priests of trated counterrevolutionary vitriol around him. The revolutionary caricature, these figures are all recognizable, their caricatural onslaught against Camus in 1791 does not seem to features appropriated in some cases from known portraits.34 have been directed with the same intensity at other legislators Counterrevolutionary caricature, as Langlois has suggested, involved in the issue of assignats. These condemnations did “played the card of the immediate present,” unlike revolution- not cease after 1791 but actually increased in intensity after the ary prints, which relied on a contrast between a rejected past withdrawal of the assignat five years later. In the anonymous and a revolutionary future, disregarding for the most part a Camus et un acolyte accueillent un couple de rentiers of 1797 (fig. present populated by contemporary political figures.35 13), the bizarrely gnome-like figure of the archivist, seated In this ironic paraphrasing of the corporeal duality of astride repossessed furniture and clutching a handful of royalty, Camus is cast as a paper monarch, insubstantial and assignats, is posited as responsible for the assignat’s deprecia- lacking in real authority. His disrobing mimics the staged tion and the rentiers’ ruin, his companion sporting oversized publicness of the royal déshabiller, thrown into sharp relief by clothes reclaimed from one such impoverished figure. Camus the tattered garments of the elderly royal soldier of the order is referred to by name again in L’impayable rentier de l’état, que of Saint-Louis, entering on the left-hand side of the scene. ne suis-je Camus (fig. 14), an indictment quite out of propor- This bedraggled character, who has arrived to appeal against tion to his role in either the original issue of assignats or their the withdrawal of his pension, is rebuffed by Camus and subsequent collapse.36 The figure in this print, stroking his denied access to the wealth the archivist wears about his long nose, lets us in on a joke at Camus’s expense: his name, in person; “dine with your friends” reads the piece of paper he is French, meaning “snub-nosed.” The repeated deployment of passed. The print brings to mind a range of artistic associa- this motif may imply that Camus suffers from a lack of tions, from seventeenth-century royal portraiture to the “sense.” 37 However, it is probable that it also condenses a

24 | the politics of the provisional

Chap 01.indd 24 11/28/12 11:36 AM number of sexual and anti-Semitic inferences.38 Elsewhere, the paper body is displaced onto a newspaper-clad figure repre- senting the press in Les braves brigands d’Avignon, another print by the anonymous artist responsible for L’homme aux assignats, in which Camus is situated at the center of an ultraviolent scene of revolutionary cannibalism. Identified by the inscription “Archives Nationales” across his chest, Camus is again the butt of jokes about his short or nonexistent nose, which in true carnivalesque fashion substitutes the lower bodily stratum for the reasoning head, metonymically rendering his nose a penis, albeit a small one. In this print referencing the massacres of 16 October, the legislator is depicted as an accomplice to anthropophagous revolutionaries who are seen devouring the dismembered limbs of their enemies. It may be that the breach of Camus’s flimsy armature in the earlier L’homme aux assignats had prepared the ground for a conceptual alignment with other more explicit forms of dismemberment.39 In fact, although Camus’s clothes in L’homme aux assignats are clearly composed of assignats, we are encouraged to believe that this extends to his body as a whole, for clothing is figured as a bodily fragment. It is at the margins of Camus’s body that this illusion is both maintained and uncovered, for while a furled assignat around each wrist prevents the viewer from clearly making out the edge of a sleeve, the exposed breeches, shoes, and necktie are more clearly delineated. Partly integrated with the money and partly a frame for the paper Figure 12 Leonard Schenck and Pieter notes whose ownership is being disputed, Camus’s corporeal Schenck II, Mr Jean Law, 1720. Etching. British Museum, London. Photo © autonomy is reliant on the unlikely restraint of his revolution- Trustees of the British Museum ary colleagues. This is a body in flux. Like the assignats that ornament him in this image, Camus, the revolutionary legislation for which he stands, and the revolutionary memory that his archives materialize are shown to be unfixed and transformable, a frangible surface becoming transparent and insecure before our eyes. Even the writing that covers L’homme

made of money | 25

Chap 01.indd 25 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 13 Camus et un acolyte accueillent un couple de rentiers, ca. 1797. Etching and aquatint. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Figure 14 L’impayable rentier de l’état, que ne suis-je Camus, ca. 1797. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Figure 15 Ouf!, 1794. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

aux assignats cannot stabilize the image, marking its various 15).41 However, L’homme aux assignats does not present an parts as discursive surfaces on which the partisan political image of a static, “natural” order of traditional labor, but associations of the revolutionary period might be mapped and rather it configures the assignat as an aberrant, fluctuating, read. Alongside the assignats, a multitude of other scraps of and makeshift terrain on which diverse political identities paper and fragments of text, from a key identifying the might be formed. In a visual language that allies the corporeal characters to the archives in the background, combine to to the political, the assignat is invoked as an image of political create a complex scene of interpretation for viewers of this conflict, undermining attempts to secure its value and print, pushing it in the direction of a rebus or allegory.40 challenging the claims to fiscal and symbolic stability made in The rest of the image is equally cryptic and open-ended. revolutionary images. Behind the files of matrices and departmental correspondence on the left-hand side of the image, a figure is shown burning handfuls of assignats—an uncanny premonition of their Reproducing the Revolutionary Assignat eventual fate. The walls of the chamber are decorated with The most explicit alignment of the assignat with revolutionary wallpaper whose central motif is an indistinct allegorical politics and its best-known artistic representation is undoubt- pairing of figures, one bearing a cornucopia of assignats, the edly its presence at the center of Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 other clutching a two-faced jester’s mask. The representation Marat assassiné, where a painted note, the sharp Didot of Camus in this print calls to mind the Cris de Paris genre of typeface of the “A” clearly visible, sits atop the martyred popular imagery featuring workers clad in the tools or Marat’s last piece of writing, a letter to a virtuous mother in products of their trade, a form returned to some years later to need (fig. 16). Certainly, the context for this image’s produc- satirize the penury caused by the assignat’s depreciation (fig. tion in the summer of 1793 was radically different from that

26 | the politics of the provisional

Chap 01.indd 26 11/28/12 11:36 AM made of money | 27

Chap 01.indd 27 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 16 Jacques-Louis David, Marat assassiné, 1793. Oil on canvas. Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Photo © Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels/J. Geleyns/www.roscan.be

which conditioned the making of L’homme aux assignats in sign of political value was reflected and given an expressive 1791, although the two images are far from unrelated. They language by the material instability of the assignat, the ultimate share a concern with the conditions of political legitimacy and sign of both value and worthlessness. As has been noted, even material and bodily authenticity, and in both images the in their completed form assignats were subject to piecemeal assignat is crucial to this consideration, the axis around which modification and adaptation. Yet this volatility plagued their the greater part of each work revolves. What is more, consid- production, too, as the demand for assignats became so great ered together these images have something to tell us about the that the paper used to make them was often transported and complex and unresolved relationship between portraiture, printed before it had time enough to dry, rendering the notes caricature, and paper money in 1790s France. delicate and subject to blemishes.44 Unease about this situation, In David’s painting the single, folded assignat is squarely coupled no doubt with hopes of commercial success, inspired located as an attribute of Marat and the radical Jacobinism for one proposal that assignats be printed on card.45 The anony- which he stood. The assignat represented Marat’s final act, the mous author of this pamphlet suggested that the card made by gift of hard-won money, and thus communicated his own Mme Delagarde, an associate of the famous wallpaper manu- unparalleled, self-advertised political integrity, his self-identifi- facturer Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, would be especially appropri- cation as the friend of the people.42 The physical proximity of ate.46 This citizen’s anxiety about the materiality of the national Marat’s letter to the note reinforces this allegiance, while currency, his desire that it should be “by all necessity, a repre- conversely his left hand, as a dying gesture, raises the traitor- sentative of money, that resists rubbing and mutation,” ous letter with which Corday had gained access to Marat’s expressed a fear shared by numerous revolutionary commenta- apartment away from it. Marat’s enthusiastic exposure of tors.47 In comparison to defective paper, the imperviousness of counterrevolutionaries, his demands for political and moral the “strong, supple” cardboard imparted an enchanted status, transparency, his loathing of counterfeiting or dissimulation in aligning it with permanent metal coinage. “Moreover,” the all areas of public and private life, and his claims for authentic- pamphleteer added, Mme Delagarde’s card “blackens in fire ity all seem to be bound up in this fragile little scrap of paper. rather than burning, and I have seen proof of this.”48 For T. J. Clark, this assignat, which is meant to be overlooked As a counterrevolutionary print from 1792 featuring a “but only in the way of Poe’s Hidden Letter,” is central to the coin descending from the clouds above an awed and apprecia- painting’s message.43 The lightweight paper assignat, in Clark’s tive audience suggests (fig. 17), the indestructibility of the insightful reading, carries a “freight of meaning” and stands coined royal profile rendered it sacred, for this image repre- for the contingency of revolutionary politics made material, sents the magical return of metal coinage as equivalent to a representing the dangerous arbitrariness of the sign as well as divinely ordained revival of monarchy. Although his political the concrete virtue of poverty with which David hoped to sympathies were quite different, the pamphleteer’s claim to credit Marat. have seen the failed burning of the new assignat with his own Both Marat assassiné and L’homme aux assignats focus on eyes marks an attempt to claim similar magical properties for the represented body as a site of, respectively, immortality or the assignat, close scrutiny of the note playing, as always, an disintegration, betraying a very real fear in both images that the important role in its profession of truth. These concerns were opposite might be the case. The precariousness of the body as a exploited nine months after the publication of this pamphlet

28 | the politics of the provisional

Chap 01.indd 28 11/28/12 11:36 AM made of money | 29

Chap 01.indd 29 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 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, 1792. Aquatint. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1990.46.24. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/Domaine de Vizille

by the artist responsible for L’homme aux assignats and by encouraged by a competition launched in July 1793 to find a David in Marat assassiné. While the former alleged that the way to “perfect the assignats” as a preventative measure against material frailty of the assignat, its translucency and vulner- counterfeiting.49 The persistent trace of the assignat in the ability to wear and tear were irrevocably bound to an eco- context of David’s painting was a rebuttal of the damage that nomic and political collapse, the latter represented the counterfeiting—and, we might add, counterrevolutionary assignat as an inviolable sign of political virtue. Isolated as a caricature—were doing. By linking the assignat to Marat, unique, sacred relic rather than as a mass of worthless paper, David bolstered the assignat’s revolutionary credentials, which the surviving assignat is the double of Marat himself, for via in turn confirmed Marat’s legitimacy and conveniently this image both are shown to have in some way survived the promoted David’s own political status and artistic practice. death of the body. Painting and paper collaborated to achieve the same ends, David’s use of Marat’s assignat to connote the journal- united in their resistance to L’homme aux assignats’s denigra- ist’s political and moral authenticity was nevertheless insepa- tion of both assignats and revolutionary portraits. rable from the lack of authenticity that plagued the assignat at In actual fact, David’s painting is a rare example of an the time of the image’s production. Many artists, David assignat appearing in a revolutionary image of any medium. included, were involved with the design of the assignat, By virtue of the proscription against counterfeiting, artists

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Chap 01.indd 30 11/28/12 11:36 AM whose political credentials were less secure than David’s The joke in this print is that the bloated and complacent steered clear of directly representing the notes, a scruple Louis was dissimilar in appearance to the noble, classically obviously not shared by counterrevolutionary image-makers, inflected countenance depicted in profile on the note, although who inevitably operated on the fringes of the law. Printmakers of course, in fact, as Desmoulins reported, “the delay in prepar- in particular had to tread carefully, as they especially risked ing them [the pigs’ feet] and the too close likeness of his face on accusations of counterfeiting. Teacher Pierre Vivé’s defense in an assignat were fatal to him. The postmaster who had seen the early 1796 of a young deaf-mute man accused of imitating, painting thought he recognized the model.”55 Similarity, rather during the harsh winter of 1795, five and ten livres notes to the than difference, was the primary means of the king’s undoing. value of forty-five livres, in pencil and pen, is instructive in What is more, as Desmoulins realized, the juxtaposition of this regard.50 The culprit, Louis Baudonnet, was apprehended assignat and king was triangulated with the memory of earlier in a cake shop trying to spend his counterfeits, which were encounters with Louis’s painted portrait. Consequently, as with crudely made. Vivé argued that as Baudonnet’s notes were L’homme aux assignats, the force of this caricature is not derived drawings, rather than prints, they could not be considered from excessive exaggeration or distortion of the king’s facial counterfeits, and he was eventually acquitted due to his lack of features but rather from his humiliating situation and the intention to defraud. The case hinged on Baudonnet’s appearance of his body from the neck down. Both caricature, supposed misunderstanding of the phrase “the law punishes which ultimately depends for its success on viewers’ ability to the counterfeiter with death,” which he had painstakingly identify its subjects, and the assignat, for which recognition of copied onto each note, signing, like all counterfeiters, an authenticity was crucial, function here as media of verification. admission of guilt and potential death sentence.51 As this caricature of Louis amply demonstrates, not only was There were, however, some exceptions to the revolution- close examination central to the credibility of assignats, but the ary interdiction against the reproduction of the assignat, such notes themselves also bore the vestiges of an authenticating as a print representing the disguised Louis XVI being recog- potential inherited from metal coinage. nized against his portrait on an assignat (fig. 18), foiling his The institutional dissimulation for which the king stood 1791 attempt to flee Paris for Varennes. A reduced scale seems accused was contrasted in this print with the virtuous trans- to have justified this more schematic representation.52 Along- parency of the assignat. However, by ridiculing the king and side the degrading sexual undertones of masturbation figured exposing his inability to live up to the ideal standard figured in the phallic pig’s foot clasped by the king, the image is, as on the note, the comparison between the king and his portrait Rebecca Spang has observed, a scene in which the king is inadvertently called attention to the instability of the assignat called to account. For while the postmaster Drouet appears to and its failure to communicate a solitary, truthful meaning, be presenting Louis with his bill, it in fact bears no sum but unlike the mutual authentication evinced by David’s portrait his head, the actual price he must pay for his crimes.53 This of Marat. Juxtaposing “authentic” and “inauthentic” represen- ghoulish politico-economic analogy resonates with the tations of political power, the print fails to resolve fully the popular print motif, sometimes (incorrectly) attributed to question of which, if either, is the “true” image. The barely Philibert-Louis Debucourt, of a “patriotic calculator” totting repressed implication here is that both king and assignat, up the number of severed heads.54 might, in fact, be counterfeits.

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Chap 01.indd 31 11/28/12 11:36 AM 32 | the politics of the provisional

Chap 01.indd 32 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 18 Le roi mangeant des pieds à la Sainte Menehould, le maitre du poste confronte un assignat et reconnait le roi, from Révolutions de France et de Brabant, no. 81, 1791. Etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Fabrications In fact, as police records show, the situation was far Without a doubt, counterfeiting presented the most sustained more complex, for although those sentenced to death for threat to the value and stability of paper currency. By increas- counterfeiting were largely employed in artisanal occupations, ing the number of notes in circulation, counterfeit production the range was considerable, from clockmaker to soldier, devalued the official currency, undermining confidence in its rabbit-skin salesman to lawyer.58 In addition, the British ability to represent and maintain a universal standard. government, supported by émigré leaders such as Louis XVI’s Unfortunately those responsible for policing the assignat, the brother, the Comte d’Artois, was engaged in a sustained and local police and the centralized bureaux of authentication and extensive program of counterfeiting, flooding France with manufacture, often did not know where to look for illicit forgeries in an attempt to provoke economic ruin. In March production. Common sense suggested that the majority of 1792 the Chronique de Paris reported the seizure at Passy of counterfeiters—whether unemployed journeymen or paper- thirteen million livres of counterfeit assignats, which indicated makers who had come by a stolen printing plate—were the scale of the problem, although there was confusion about involved in the printing trade at some level. With this in which counterrevolutionary body was responsible.59 In mind, one commentator expressed incredulity at the thought London alone, more than seventeen counterfeiting establish- that artists might become involved in such a despicable ments are rumored to have existed by 1795, allegedly employ- activity, remarking that “it is difficult to believe that a top-rate ing some four hundred workers.60 This operation reached its artist can at the same time be a counterfeiter and an assassin.”56 peak around 1794, as counterfeit assignats arrived in vast Interestingly, this only applied to artists “de premier ordre,” quantities to aid the war in the Vendée.61 Lacking legal the implication being that lesser artists were probably well existence, émigrés occupied a provisional and frequently used to slavish copying and thus more likely to be involved in invisible position with regard to the Revolution they opposed, counterfeiting, for only producers of elite cultural products and by July 1792 their land and buildings had been comman- were exempt from the revolutionary suspicion of representa- deered by the Legislative Assembly.62 This unseen quality tion. Prosecutions for those accused of counterfeiting often engendered a deep-seated paranoia about their movements attempted to identify the act of counterfeiting with other and a popular surveillance that detected their hand in any forms of dissimulation or simulation, whether in the context suspicious or potentially counterrevolutionary activity. of the crime itself or in other areas of the accused’s life.57 Counterfeit assignats forcibly asserted émigré agency in the

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Chap 01.indd 33 11/28/12 11:36 AM Revolution, backed by a partisan émigré press that reversed The complex materiality of the assignat was a direct revolutionary rhetoric to accuse France’s leaders of the corrupt response to these conditions, and the visuality of assignats use of devalued assignats for their own ends.63 itself frequently operated at a hidden or fugitive level. Some Anxiety over the exchange of counterfeit notes was notes, such as a two hundred livres note from April 1790, even paralleled by institutional concern about the safe circulation utilized typographic “secrets”—in this case an extended of legitimate assignats. For instance, Lavigne, deputy of the left-hand upright to the “N” of “Nationale,” practically department of Lot and Garonne, railed against the possible invisible to the naked eye—that counterfeiters might inadver- dangers involved in sending assignats by post. These hazards tently correct, making, in effect, a copy truer than the origi- included the murder of couriers, theft, distribution of coun- nal.66 Assignats were produced under conditions of utmost terfeits, and false claims that money had been sent when it had secrecy, their printers sworn to confidentiality and required to not or that money had not been received when it had.64 To carry identity cards. Equally, counterfeiters were bound by a prevent these duplicitous acts, Lavigne suggested the introduc- code of silence that resulted from their desire to prevent tion of a system proposed by Finiquel whereby citizens should detection. Prison did not stop many counterfeiters, proving an present their assignats of five livres or more for verification the ideal environment in which to acquire necessary contacts and day before dispatch. The notes would be stamped and sealed knowledge; once captured, distributers of assignats printed within a special envelope that would receive further imprints abroad were accommodated alongside domestic criminals at at each town through which it passed. On arrival the recipient Châtelet, la Conciergerie, la Force, l’Abbaye, and Bicêtre would receive, with the money, a printed pro forma document prisons.67 As often as not, counterfeiting operations were the filled in with written details of the notes signed by both sender outcome of imprisonment for very different crimes. Conse- and verifier, which would act as a guarantee of transmission.65 quently, both official and nonofficial assignat production were This control of circulation mirrored the increasing surveillance based on a “closed shop” mentality that put a high premium of individual movement at the time, represented in printed on the discovery and examination of the others’ work. In effect, form by the passport, whose stamps, signatures, and descrip- legal and illicit manufacturers were in competition against one tions likewise accumulated at every town or checkpoint another for the same market, despite their evident differences. through which a bearer passed, demonstrating the ambiva- Initial issues of assignats had been produced in a variety lence with which revolutionaries approached the circulation of of printing workshops, as well as on Anisson-Duperron’s press both images and bodies. In a similar vein, counterfeit assig- at the Imprimerie Royale, later Nationale.68 In 1791 produc- nats—printed “ANNULÉ” or “FAUX” in capitalized text with tion was transferred to the former monastery of the Petits- a manuscript procès-verbal detailing the nature of the crime on Augustins on the Place Vendôme, a move that required the the verso side—were archived after their discovery as a displacement of the collection of natural history housed there. safeguard against similar imitations, entering the mushroom- As production increased in intensity, more and more parts of ing apparatus of revolutionary bureaucracy as annotated the monastery were appropriated to accommodate the presses. criminal histories. Nonetheless, no image was secure, and even On 5 July 1792 the monastery of the Petits-Pères and that of assignats certified as real were often revealed as fakes after a the Grands-Augustins on the Place des Victoires were similarly period of time. claimed by the Revolution, following an appeal by Finance

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Chap 01.indd 34 11/28/12 11:36 AM Minister Clavière to Roland, minister of the interior.69 Finally, compare each assignat with one known to be correct, whereby on 7 September 1792, the Convent of the Capuchins was “one glance is enough to perceive the shapes and measure the adapted for this purpose alongside the Petits-Augustins in the spaces.”73 In a similar mode, a table produced by Deperey in assignat-making center of the Place Vendôme.70 Although the 1794 comprised an extensive list of comparisons between real convents and monasteries were appropriately large buildings and false assignats, including their most recent procès-verbal with adequate security and ready-made spaces for the inser- description and their most prominent distinguishing features. tion of large-scale printing equipment, the practical require- This body of information made it possible to scrutinize ments of fabrication were matched by an unmistakable counterfeit assignats as if they were themselves criminals.74 symbolic significance. Always concluding “certified as complying with the original,” On 1 June 1790 the National Assembly had ordered the these printed anticounterfeiting documents were implicated foundation of bureaux de vérification in every major town. in the same debates about political and material authenticity However, this command was never fulfilled, and counterfeit- that structured the assignat, while in the wrong hands they ing was not subjected to consistent institutional surveillance could, ironically, prove an effective guide to the production of until June 1792, when a committee comprising De Surgy, perfect forgeries. Delaître, and De la Marche was charged with the examination Despite his prioritization of the visual, Deperey urged his of suspect notes, and the government centers for the fabrica- reader to seek the true assignat not in the image but in the text tion of assignats, headed by De la Marche (whose death and the devices used to frame the image. Whereas images—the warrant David was later to sign), took overall control of the timbre sec and timbre identique—were susceptible to the “genius assignats’ authentication.71 The institution of a specific of the artist who designed them,” the same could not be said of sub-body responsible for the systematic verification of “letters,” which, he claimed, articulated a far more objective, assignats, led by Deperey, chief inspector of assignats, was not virtuous stance on reality.75 Deperey proposed that special accomplished until quite late, on 4 January 1793, while offices attention be paid to letters that required particular skill to for the authentication of assignats were not placed on national produce, such as S, s, R, r, E, e, A, and a, contributing, despite borders until 13 ventôse year II (3 March 1794)—a calamitous his suspicion of artistic agency, to a belief that the master delay, considering the quantity of forged notes entering France printer alone could produce types in which perfection resided from abroad.72 in “the purity, the regularity, the clarity of design.”76 Invoking Determining the authenticity of an assignat required an the language of contemporary neoclassical architecture, whose intimate knowledge of each aspect of its construction and association with the ideal and unmediated was elicited to the appearance. Assistance was available in the form of lists of advantage of the assignat, Deperey praised “the purity and characteristic marks, which supplied exhaustive detail on the boldness that exists in the engraving of these letters,” approving many checks necessary to ensure proof of authenticity. their “��������caractère���������������������������������������������,”�������������������������������������������� a term of commendation found in contempo- Although Deperey was forced to admit that “it is impossible to rary architectural treatises that linked formal to moral charac- give a statement of signs of falsehood for all the species of false teristics.77 This classical language of typeface is perhaps assignats in circulation; the number of them would be too unsurprising in an era where so much projected architecture large,” he nevertheless proposed that the best method was to never made it beyond the page. With architecture as text and

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Chap 01.indd 35 11/28/12 11:36 AM text as architecture, a rhetoric of solidity and authenticity was distinction between official and nonofficial notes and severely established that confirmed printed text as a signifier of struc- hampered the detection of counterfeits. When Augustin de tural and monetary legitimacy. Saint-Aubin was asked to engrave the king’s profile for the first Deperey’s suggested technique exemplifies how the issue of assignats, it became clear that a single copper plate legitimacy of an assignat depended, for both individuals and the could not withstand millions of impressions. Moreover, even state, on its visual reception, and he concluded his report by if the plate did survive, the process would be so time-consum- proposing that “verifying machines” be installed in public ing as to be prohibitive. Saint-Aubin engraved as many as banks.78 These machines—which were, it seems, never produced three hundred plates of the king’s head, each one, despite the on any great scale—consisted of frames laid over the suspect artist’s best efforts, deviating slightly from the first engraved.82 notes, on which several features were marked for correspon- As a result, the very insignia chosen to indicate authenticity, dence, or a system of reflecting mirrors that allowed comparison the king’s head, functioned as a destabilizing presence on the between a suspect note and an authenticated original.79 Con- note. In this context, how were revolutionary image-makers trary to Deperey’s strategy of juxtaposition, the scientist and law-givers supposed to distinguish true from false? Where, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier suggested an alternative to the in Saint-Aubin’s multiple “states,” was an original able to fetishization of similitude as the sole guarantee of authenticity. withstand scrutiny as a paradigm of authenticity, with all the Lavoisier argued that counterfeiting would be made more attendant cultural and economic ramifications that implied? difficult by the adoption of more areas of difference, as the more The problem posed by Saint-Aubin’s deviations from the complex the technical attributes of a particular note, the more original was eventually resolved by the introduction of expensive it would prove to counterfeit.80 In practice, a combi- stereotyping after 1 February 1793. For the first few years of nation of techniques exploiting both similarity and difference their production, assignats had been made by bringing were employed, sometimes at the same time, on the same note. together a set of diverse elements, the engravings, types, and In 1802 Camus himself weighed in on these debates, in borders, within a metal frame known as a forme (or “skeleton” his Histoire et procédés du polytypage et de la stéréotypie, an in printer’s slang), from which an image was printed. Com- account of the development of stereotype printing. Camus pleted formes of the same note were variable and had a limited acclaimed the technological advances made in the production lifespan, while the components were liable to move slightly of assignats, yet he noted how a cursory examination of within the forme during the printing process. This labor-inten- counterfeits and counterfeiting procedures had shown how sive procedure also limited the quantity of assignats that could “the first counterfeiter of assignats was the Government itself, be produced, as each sheet of paper would have to be printed since aside from the first plate used, all the others were but several times from the same forme. Stereotyping, which more or less faithful imitations and copies.”81 Camus’s discov- involved printing from a cast forme, was a means by which ery of institutionalized counterfeiting was not an accusation of each assignat could be made to resemble exactly another of the criminal goings-on in government office. Rather, he was same type. In this method, strips of copper, or matrices, referring to the inability of the printmaking process to deal featuring the engravings were as usual attached to the forme, with the vast quantity of assignats requiring printing. This which also held the typefaces. This was then stamped, with a technological misstep resulted in an unfortunate lack of specially constructed striking machine, into a viscous,

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Chap 01.indd 36 11/28/12 11:36 AM recooling mixture of lead, antimony, and tin, which yielded suggested remained always shot through with ambiguity. the fragmented elements of the composition, the type, line, Furthermore, as these images demonstrate, caricature was and ornament, as a single plate, or cliché.83 Rather than each particularly well situated to address the fractured relationship artist having to make a large quantity of duplicate plates, a between normative, coherent, “original” bodies and their single plate could by this method be reproduced in large deformed, deceptive, or unhealthy imitations. numbers, ensuring perfect similitude between assignats. In his plea that “it is urgent to reestablish circulation, Furthermore, unlike conventional intaglio procedures, with whose languor is a grave sickness for the whole body politic,” the stereotype method formes could be composed in a visually Anne-Pierre Montesquiou was not alone in locating assignat “correct” manner, allowing greater speed and ease of produc- use at the center of discourses surrounding the health of the tion.84 The engraver Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux recognized the nation.86 This is unsurprising perhaps, for as the deputy revolutionary impact that stereotyping had on assignat Lanthenas observed, “in the organization of a true Republic, production, for whereas in the past “one tried to engrave an everything is linked, each part is related to the others, as in the assignat from only one piece, as a means to ensure perfect admirable organization of animate bodies.”87 The threat posed resemblance,” its introduction rendered such technical by counterfeiting was imagined via a metaphor of contagion virtuosity unnecessary.85 The commencement of stereotyping that counteracted the “purity” required of official notes, and in the government workshops followed just ten days after the Deperey found ready support for his characterization of false execution of Louis XVI, whose fluctuating profile on the assignats as “infectious.”88 Only close examination of the paper assignat had blurred the boundary between original and copy, body of the assignat could prevent this illness, and the undermining revolutionary representation from within. transparent skin of the assignat was repeatedly and anxiously looked “through,” much as Deperey suggested it should be. As another anonymous image issued by Wébert demon- Sickness and Speculation strates (fig. 19), this corporeal language was shared by those All of these debates about the truth-telling function of paper opposed to the Revolution and was associated in particular money were crucial to and prefigured in counterrevolutionary with the diseased female body. At the center of this print, a caricature. Prints such as L’homme aux assignats purported to woman representing the Constitution is expiring, appropri- expose a secret revolutionary space and to reveal the greedy ately enough from consumption, on a bed of assignats. The and self-serving attitudes of a revolutionary elite, expanding to journalist Linotte, writing about this print in the counterrevo- the level of political allegory the accusations of flimsiness and lutionary newspaper Journal de la Cour et de la Ville, imagined artificiality that beset the assignat. However, despite its the Constitution as already dead, bound in a funeral shroud revelatory claims, caricature was, like the assignat itself, a form constructed from “pieces of paper, colored, effigied, and of representation that occupied an uncertain middle ground marked with a dry stamp.”89 Tuberculosis, as Susan Sontag between authenticity and falsehood, playing with categories of observed, “makes the body transparent,” and in this print the similarity and difference. By appropriating other areas of the body of the Constitution and the assignats that support her visual, caricature, despite its political partisanship, left open a are subjected to a clinical scrutiny that parodies the revolu- space for interpretation that meant the new realities it tionary obsession with political transparency.90

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Chap 01.indd 37 11/28/12 11:36 AM Figure 19 L’expirante Targinette, 1792. Aquatint. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, 1988.152. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/ Domaine de Vizille

Figure 20 Cas des assignats, chez l’étranger, 1792. Colored etching. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Photo: Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Gui-Jean-Baptiste Target, a lawyer and Parisian deputy Camus, taking her pulse—monitoring, in other words, her who had played an important role in the development of the circulation—desperately administers restorative “bouillons de Constitution, is depicted as the “father” of this figure. He clergé,” made from the concentrated blood of the priest that the stands at the bedhead, dabbing his eyes and mourning the Abbé Fauchet is busy dispatching to the left-hand side of the imminent demise of his daughter, “Targinette.” Related images image. Again, the iconoclastic erasure of Camus’s nose rearticu- of an obese Target giving birth to the Constitution had already lates the satirical punning on his name. In the foreground, been widely circulated in royalist circles, while conversely, a Bailly, a former astronomer, examines with a telescope a number of revolutionary prints featured a dying aristocratic chamber pot filled with constitutional decrees and erroneously body attended by members of the nobility.91 Meanwhile, suggests to his wife that hope may yet be discovered within,

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Chap 01.indd 38 11/28/12 11:36 AM while she, confirming the scopic anxiety surrounding the format and, indeed, it may be that Cas des assignats was a assignat, worries about where he has left his glasses. rejoinder to Bref du Pape en 1791, a revolutionary print that Scatology of this kind had provided a common language mocked the angry papal response to the Civil Constitution of for the expression of counterrevolutionary as well as revolu- the Clergy by representing a leering revolutionary defecating tionary sentiment. For instance, Cas des assignats (fig. 20) on the papal bull. Camus had himself authored a reply to assails the assignat’s frail international reputation by depicting Rome, and it is possible that this had encouraged a derivative stereotyped representatives of other European states wiping counterrevolutionary riposte in the form of a satire on their backsides on the paper money, invoking a range of assignats, for counterrevolutionary and revolutionary images familiar psycho-social implications.92 This was a recognizable regularly cross-pollinated one another.93

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Chap 01.indd 39 11/28/12 11:36 AM Anxieties about the health of the national body fre- For this author, the actions of bankers of illegal games quently coalesced on the issue of speculation, described by (known as “pigeons,” because of their “plumage”) caused Camille Saint-Aubin as a “ghost.”94 Speculation was a politi- immediate physical harm to the player—little wonder that Le cally fluid charge, for while gambling with the nation’s wealth Chapelier is represented as such an exploitative figure in was the accusation made against the inventors of the assignat L’homme aux assignats. In a paper presented to the Paris in caricatures such as L’homme aux assignats, speculation on medical school on 22 pluviôse an XIII (11 February 1805), the assignat was the bête noire of revolutionary conspiracists. Benjamin Levraud, a doctor from Barbezieux, explained the Whereas publications such as Ange Goudar’s 1757 Histoire des detrimental effects that the gaming environment could have Grecs had attempted to dignify private gambling with a history on persistent gamblers. The doors and windows kept shut for by equating it with and justifying it against legal financial secrecy’s sake, a lack of circulating air in the gambling space speculation, for Burke, revolutionary France itself was a spread infection. Dissimulation was both aetiology and disordered world turned upside-down, in which the functions symptom of the gambler’s physical disintegration. Further- of state operated according to the random and hazardous more, not only did speculation distort the value of currencies, principles of a game of risk.95 That this should be, in Burke’s it turned its practitioners into living caricatures whose facial words, the “vital breath” powering the body politic was a disfigurement threatened their easy identification. Levraud premonition of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s cynical appraisal of tracked the changes that occurred to the gambler as he speculation and gambling at the Palais-Royal as the “systole” anticipated, began, and either won or lost a game. This task and “diastole” of the nation.96 was not easily accomplished, for “nothing is more difficult to Speculation, whether privately indulged or perpetrated paint than the physiognomy of a player. The muscles of his on a national scale, was alleged to bring about a physical and face have acquired, by the frequency of their contractions, mental decline. The Chevalier de Jaucourt, writing in the such mobility, that the same figure can be unrecognizable at Encyclopédie, suggested that “the passion for gambling is one each moment.”99 of the most fatal by which one can be possessed.” Further- The task of counterrevolutionary caricature, in bringing more, as de Jaucourt described, “the man is so violently to account revolutionaries who were accused of gambling with agitated by the game, that he can no longer endure any other the nation’s wealth, was to identify those responsible, stripping occupation. After having lost his fortune, he is condemned to away their dissimulative, variable masks and subjecting them be bored for the rest of his life.”97 A similar focus on bodily to objective representation. However, caricature’s own degeneration animates the lengthy printed denunciations, exaggerations and lack of fixity function in an uneasy relation- listing active Parisian maisons de jeu in the 1790s. We read of ship to these precise claims, and we can read something of this one response to a heavy loss: “At the moment when gold and uncertainty in the unwillingness of counterrevolutionary banknotes flow in great streams from their cashier’s table, one artists to exaggerate or deform the facial features of their [gambler] tears out their hair, another breaks his spoon, this subjects, apart from, perhaps, Camus’s disappearing nose. one makes terrible imprecations, that one goes away pale like L’homme aux assignats is a print that is all about transparency, death, being hardly able to walk, his soul is so hardened, his which is presented as a complex, unresolved sign of both heart so withered.”98 political virtue and of political and financial degeneration,

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Chap 01.indd 40 11/28/12 11:36 AM pushed to extreme, corporeally threatening conclusions. A images demonstrate the very real currency of caricature, its year after the production of L’homme aux assignats, the removal possibilities but also its limitations, and its intervention in a of the king’s profile on the assignat would raise the stakes for wide variety of practices, debates, and representations during this politically charged form of erasure. Yet the print repre- the brief flowering of counterrevolutionary printmaking in sents Camus’s body—the revolutionary body—in a process of 1790s France. More important, they articulate the precarious- transition, for Camus is not quite yet made transparent. ness of the assignat as a legitimate sign of value but also its Rather, L’homme aux assignats and related images published in utility, as an image or, rather, a competing aggregation of the early 1790s position the fragile and fragmented mass of images that were central to how politically heterogeneous paper currency as the contested, provisional revolutionary audiences negotiated the Revolution’s radical subversion of body, its boundaries redrawn to the many designs of revolu- accepted criteria for political, material, and corporeal tionary and counterrevolutionary politics. In so doing, these authenticity.

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Chap 01.indd 41 11/28/12 11:36 AM “This brilliant and profoundly original book makes us see the French Revolution with new eyes. Richard Taws is emerging as one of the major new voices in writing about the French Revolution and visual politics in general.” Lynn Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles

“What Richard Taws offers is a series of concepts with which to frame French Revolutionary visual

culture: to the notion of the provisional, he adds currency, identity, circulation, temporal rupture, media A rt a nd E phe m era i n R ev transgression, and mimetic dissimulation. Not only are the arguments and formal analyses moored to original material, but they are so cogently structured that it is hard to see them as anything but convincing. Art historians have much to learn from the approach Taws takes. He renders an entire realm of images and objects foundational to our understanding of the production, status, and meaning of representation in the 1790s—and, in so doing, he develops models for thinking about the relation of the visual to political upheaval more generally. This is one of the most sophisticated accounts of material culture I have read.” Erika Naginski, Harvard University

“The Politics of the Provisional engages with several historiographies within the sprawling subject of the French Revolution. It is very difficult to find a really original take on just about any aspect of the o l Revolution, but Richard Taws does. This is quite a feat.” u ti on ar Katherine Crawford, Vanderbilt University

In revolutionary France, materiality was not easily achieved. The turmoil of y F ra n ce war, shortages, 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, as this book argues, 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-historical accounts of the period, The Politics of the Provisional contends that widely distributed, ephemeral, or “in-between” images and objects were at the heart of contemporary debates on the nature of political authenticity and historical memory. Provisionality had a politics, and it signified less the failure of the Revolution’s attempts to historicize itself than a tactical awareness of the need to continue the Revolution’s work.

Richard Taws is Lecturer in the History of Art, University College London.

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania www.psupress.org

Cover illustration: J. Benizy dit. Jean Dubuisson [del. sculp.], Valeur des assignats et autres papiers monnaies, depuis l’époque de leur emission en France, jusqu’à celle ou ils ont cessé d’avoir cours, from Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française. Colored etching and engraving, ca. 1800–1802. Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille, L 1984.253.2.56. Photo © Coll. Musée de la Révolution Française/Domaine de Vizille.