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© COPYRIGHT
by
Hoyon Mephokee
2020
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
AT THE CENTER OF THE GLOBE: JEAN-BAPTISTE CARPEAUX’S FONTAINE DES
QUATRE-PARTIES-DU-MONDE, 1867-74
BY
Hoyon Mephokee
ABSTRACT
Commissioned in 1867 and installed in 1874, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s (1827-1875) Les
Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste (The Four Parts of the World Supporting the
Celestial Sphere), also referred to as the Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde (Fountain of the
Four Parts of the World), is a public sculpture that adorns a fountain at the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. The monument sits on the axis between the Luxembourg Palace and the Paris Observatory and depicts four nude female figures who support a celestial sphere, and who represent the four continents—Europe, America, Africa, and Asia—through their distinct physiognomic features.
This thesis interrogates the work’s racial iconography and spatial relationship to sites that embodied French political and scientific authority during the Second French Empire. Reading the monument’s iconography in relation to its placement in the charged space of Haussmannized Paris,
I suggest that Napoléon III intended Carpeaux’s work to affirm his right to govern and his need to unite a divided French nation. The Fontaine embodied the contradictions of Napoléon III’s political messaging, as his regime outwardly championed progressive ideals, while it built and sustained itself on imperial and racial conservatism and French racial and political superiority.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply appreciative of the AU Art History faculty for extending to me the opportunity to be a part of this incredibly challenging and rewarding program. I am grateful to Dr. Juliet Bellow for always being available and willing to guide me and my projects. Her mentorship has been indispensable, from our first conversation about graduate school in the summer of 2018 to the completion of this thesis. I would like to thank Dr. Ying-Chen Peng, whose insights shaped the direction of a significant portion of this project. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. Nancy Rose
Marshall for instilling in me a love of nineteenth-century European art during my undergraduate years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and for encouraging me to pursue this graduate degree.
The primary research that went into this thesis was made possible by the late Dr. Carol
Bird Ravenal, whose award allowed me to travel to France in the summer of 2019; Jaylynn Saure, the administrative coordinator and unsung hero of our department; Cécile Gérard at the Archives
Municipales de Valenciennes, who sent me scans of archival documents; and Nadège Horner at the Musée d’Orsay, who generously provided me with her own archival transcriptions.
I am thankful to my peers in the cohort for welcoming me into the program and for their emotional and intellectual support. I am, likewise, thankful to my college roommates and my friends from home, who were willing to listen to me talk about my project ad nauseam, and whose messages and calls kept me simultaneously grounded and afloat.
Finally, I am indebted to my family. My parents, Chanin Mephokee and Yi Yangshin, are my academic role models. I credit this degree and thesis to their unconditional love, patience, and support, as well as to what I can only describe as the herculean efforts they took to raise me.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT...... ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... v
INTRODUCTION...... 1
CHAPTER 1 THE FRENCH EMPIRE UNDER NAPOLÉON III...... 9
CHAPTER 2 MAPPING THE FONTAINE...... 20
CHAPTER 3 THE FONTAINE’S RACIAL ICONOGRAPHY...... 34
CONCLUSION: A MONUMENT FOR THE FRENCH COLONIAL EMPIRE...... 54
ILLUSTRATIONS...... 59
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 62
iv
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste (The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere), 1867-74. Bronze...... 59
Figure 2: Emmanuel Fremiet, Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867-74. Bronze...... 59
Figure 3: Carpeaux, Europe, from Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867- 74. Bronze...... 59
Figure 4: Carpeaux, America, from Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867- 74. Bronze...... 59
Figure 5: Carpeaux, Africa, from Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867- 74. Bronze...... 59
Figure 6: Carpeaux, Asia, from Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867- 74. Bronze...... 59
Figure 7: Carpeaux, L’Empereur reçoit Abd el-Kader au palais de Saint-Cloud (The Emperor Receiving Abd el-Kader at the Palace of Saint Cloud), 1853. Marble...... 59
Figure 8: Carpeaux, Le Prince Impérial et son chien Néro (The Imperial Prince and his dog Nero), 1865. Marble...... 59
Figure 9: Carpeaux, Ugolin et ses fils (Ugolino and His Sons), 1865-67. Marble...... 59
Figure 10: Israël Silvestre, Perspective Above Versailles, c. 1690. Drawing...... 59
Figure 11: Pierre Le Pature, General Map of the Palace of Versailles, 1717. Engraving...... 59
Figure 12: Hildegard of Bingen, The Universal Man, from Liber Divinorum Operum, 1165. Painting...... 59
Figure 13: Thomas of Cantimpré, from De natura rerum, 1295. Manuscript...... 59
Figure 14: Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, ca. 1492. Drawing, ink, and wash on paper...... 60
Figure 15: Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa (Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa), 1804. Oil on canvas...... 60
Figure 16: Jean-Baptiste Tuby, Charles Le Brun, Bassin d’Apollon (The Fountain of Apollo), 1668- 71. Bronze...... 60
v
Figure 17: Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: Title-page with Four Figures which Embody the Four Known Continents, 1606. Illustration...... 60
Figure 18: Francesco Bertos, Allegorical Groups Representing the Four Continents: Europe, 1710-25. Bronze...... 60
Figure 19: Bertos, Allegorical Groups Representing the Four Continents: America, 1710-25. Bronze...... 60
Figure 20: Bertos, Allegorical Groups Representing the Four Continents: Africa, 1710-25. Bronze...... 60
Figure 21: Bertos, Allegorical Groups Representing the Four Continents: Asia, 1710-25. Bronze...... 60
Figure 22: Aimé-Jules Dalou, Caryatids: The Four Continents, 1867. Patinated plaster...... 60
Figure 23: Charles Cordier, La Capresse des Colonies (The Capresse of the Colonies), 1861. Algerian onyx-marble, bronze and gilt bronze, enamel, amethyst; white marble socle...... 60
Figure 24: François-August Biard, Proclamation of the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies, 27 April 1848, 1849. Oil on Canvas...... 60
Figure 25: Carpeaux, La Négresse (Pourquoi naître esclave ?), 1868. Terra Cotta...... 60
Figure 26: Vasco Fernandes, Adoration of the Magi, 1501. Oil on panel...... 60
Figure 27: Cordier, Chinois (Chinese Man), 1853. Gilded and enameled bronze...... 60
Figure 28: Jean-Jacques Grandville, Commerce Anglais, from La Caricature, 1840...... 60
Figure 29: Carpeaux, Le Chinois (Bust of a Chinese Man), 1872. Patinated plaster...... 61
Figure 30: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Réception des ambassadeurs siamois par Napoléon III dans le château de Fontainebleau, le 27 juin 1861 (Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at the Château of Fontainebleau, June 27, 1861), 1865. Oil on canvas...... 61
Figure 31: Jacques-Louis David, Le Sacre de Napoléon (Coronation of Napoléon), 1807. Oil on canvas...... 61
Figure 32: Carpeaux, Varnished plaster model for Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, exhibited 1872. Patinated plaster...... 61
vi
INTRODUCTION
In 1874, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s (1827-1875) Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste (The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere), also referred to as the Fontaine des Quatre-Parties-du-Monde (Fountain of the Four Parts of the World), was installed at the southern end of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris (Fig. 1). The monumental bronze sculpture was commissioned in 1867 by Jean-Antoine-Gabriel Davioud to be the centerpiece of a new fountain and is accompanied by equestrian sculptures designed by Emmanuel Fremiet (Fig.
2).1 The commission was a part of a massive public works project to renovate and reshape Paris, initiated by Emperor Napoléon III in 1853 and executed by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann.
Although the Second French Empire’s war against Prussia and subsequent collapse in 1870 temporarily halted Carpeaux’s progress, work on Les Quatre parties du monde resumed in 1872 when Napoléon III’s successors in the Third Republic adopted the project.
Carpeaux’s sculptural group comprises four nude female figures, who represent the continents of Europe, America, Africa, and Asia (Fig. 3-6). Even as they are united through their placement on even ground and the similarities of their classicizing body types, their physiognomic features clearly differentiate them from one another in a way that upholds a racial hierarchy.2
Together, these figures support an armillary sphere, a spherical grid that represents celestial longitude and latitude. A globe is placed at the center of this frame, around which revolves a band
1 Davioud’s contributions to the Parisian landscape include the Fontaine Saint-Michel de Paris and the former Palais du Trocadéro.
2 Anne Middleton Wagner, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 266. 1
adorned with the symbols of the Western zodiac.3 There is a physical and symbolic alignment between scientific and imperial power inherent to the monument’s composition that is also mirrored in its site. Placed between the Luxembourg Palace and the Paris Observatory, Carpeaux’s piece has been interchangeably referred to as the Fontaine du Luxembourg (The Fountain of the
Luxembourg) and the Fontaine de l’Observatoire (The Fountain of the Observatory). These sites lie on the Paris meridian, an imaginary north-south line that runs through the city, and that served as a cartographic and geographic reference for French navigators and scientists. Throughout its history, it competed against the Greenwich meridian in England for the role of the prime meridian, the global primary reference point from which to measure space and time. While Carpeaux was designing his monument, the Paris meridian remained in contention for this position. Although the
Luxembourg Palace and its gardens are normally thought of as separate from the Paris Observatory and Paris meridian, the Fontaine spatially unites and activates these sites of political and historical significance.
This thesis synthesizes art-historical and historical research in a socio-historical and post- colonial examination of the Fontaine. It interrogates the work’s racial iconography and spatial relationship to sites that embodied French political and scientific authority during the Second
French Empire. Reading the monument’s iconography in relation to its placement in the charged space of Haussmannized Paris, I suggest that Napoléon III intended Carpeaux’s work to affirm his right to govern and his need to unite a divided French nation. The Fontaine embodied the
3 Lisa Salay Miller, “Carpeaux’s America: Art and Sculptural Politics,” in Art and the Native American: Perceptions, Reality, and Influences, ed. Mary Louise Krumrine and Susan Clare Scott (Philadelphia, PA: The Department of Art History, The Pennsylvania State University, 2001), 196-223. The zodiac band was designed by Eugène Legrain, who was one of Carpeaux’s students. Although these signs are placed in the correct order in terms of both their celestial positions and the dates associated with them, this order is reversed. While Lisa Miller examines the significance of this feature, it seems that Carpeaux had little control over the design of the zodiac band. What is significant is that there is a synergistic relationship writ large, between the cosmic imagery of the sphere and the racial iconography of the continents. 2
contradictions of Napoléon III’s political messaging, as his regime outwardly championed progressive ideals, while it built and sustained itself on imperial and racial conservatism and
French racial and political superiority.
Born Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, Napoléon III rose to power in the aftermath of almost sixty years of upheaval that began with the 1789 French Revolution. In 1848, another revolution permanently dismantled the French monarchy and established the Second French
Republic. That year, Louis-Napoléon won the presidential election on the basis of his relationship to his uncle, Napoléon Bonaparte, among a divided populace that was worried about continuing revolution. He was able to capitalize on his heritage and appeal to popular Bonapartist sentiments that promised to return France to a bygone era of glory and prosperity in a moment of instability.4
However, he soon took advantage of continuing turmoil within the provisional government of the
Second Republic: in 1851, he organized a coup d’état to overcome the constitutional single-term limit of his presidency and dissolved the National Assembly. The following year, Louis-Napoléon reinstated the empire first established by his uncle and crowned himself Napoléon III, Emperor of the French.
To maintain his legitimacy, Napoléon III championed himself as the inheritor of the values of the Revolution; invested in the nations’ infrastructure, notably in Paris with the help of Baron
Haussmann; and embarked on a series of international political engagements designed to increase his power and to restore France’s position as a global hegemon.5 In terms of the latter, he began his reign by framing his empire as a defender of peoples’ right to self-determination. He provided
4 Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 200l), 16.
5 Christina Carroll, “Imperial Ideologies in the Second Empire: The Mexican Expedition and the Royaume Arabe,” French Historical Studies 42, No. 1 (February 2019): 68. 3
military support for nationalist independence movements, such as in 1859, when he sent troops to
Italy to support Victor Emmanuel II’s campaign against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, growing public frustration in the 1860s with the government’s increased spending led Napoléon
III to shift toward more colonialist and expansionary endeavors overseas, as he attempted to annex territories in Central America, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. The Fontaine embodies both phases of French imperialism, supporting the central ideals of both the earlier and later periods of
Napoléon III’s regime.
It makes sense to examine the Fontaine within the politics of the Second Empire, given how intimately Carpeaux’s career was tied to that of Napoléon III’s. As an academic artist in late nineteenth-century France, Carpeaux’s career was built around government infrastructure, from his formal education at the École des Beaux-Arts to his training in Italy, funded by the Grand Prix de Rome. Sculptors, in general, depended on the government for commissions and patronage, given the high costs required to produce sculptural works and the small number of private buyers who were interested in procuring them for their homes or collections.6 As such, their practice was largely circumscribed to subjects and styles that conformed to government ideologies. Carpeaux demonstrated a profound awareness of the role of sculpture in state policy and propaganda, and actively pursued opportunities to produce works to fulfill such roles. In 1852, the first year of
Napoléon III’s reign as emperor, Carpeaux produced L’Empereur reçoit Abd el-Kader au palais de Saint-Cloud (The Emperor Receiving Abd el-Kader at the Palace of Saint Cloud) of his initiative (Fig. 7). The relief presents Napoléon III as a benevolent leader by depicting his reception of Abd el-Kader, formerly imprisoned for leading the struggle against the French colonial invasion
6 Albert Boime, Hollow Icons: The Politics of Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1987), 4. 4
of Algeria, who visited Saint Cloud to thank his liberator.7 Although in 1864, Carpeaux failed to secure an opportunity to model Napoléon III’s wife, Empress Eugénie, his persistence nonetheless yielded a commission from the Imperial Family to produce a portrait of the Imperial Prince. He completed work on Le Prince Impérial et son chien Néro (The Imperial Prince and his dog Nero) the following year (Fig. 8).
The fact that Carpeaux’s career is so closely identified with Napoléon III’s government makes it all the more surprising that the Fontaine, a major public monument at the heart of Paris, has received so little scholarly attention. The early scholarship on Carpeaux focuses less on the politics of his works and more on their style and relationship to his life—especially the two-volume biography penned in 1934 and 1935 by Louise Clément-Carpeaux, the artist’s daughter, aptly titled
La Verité sur l’oeuvre et la vie de J.-B. Carpeaux (The Truth about the Works and Life of J.B.
Carpeaux). Similarly, Ernest Chesneau’s 1880 Le Statuaire J.-B. Carpeaux : sa vie et son oeuvre
(The Statuary of J.B. Carpeaux: His Life and Works) and André Mabille de Poncheville’s 1921
Carpeaux inconnu, ou, la tradition recueillie (Carpeaux Unknown, or the Collected Traditions) present Carpeaux as a Michelangeloesque, larger-than-life artist. These early texts focus on
Carpeaux’s large-scale monumental Salon pieces like the 1865-67 Ugolin et ses fils (Ugolino and
His Sons), which depicts a story from Dante’s Inferno (Fig. 9). In it, Dante tells the story of an
Italian nobleman’s punishment for treason, which involved being imprisoned with his sons, whom he devoured after being overcome with hunger.8 Early scholars’ emphasis on works like the Ugolin
7 Wagner, 186.
8 Manuscripts by Louise Clément-Carpeaux, 1934, MS 209(2) and MS 209(3), Collections Carpeaux, Institut National d'Histoire de l’Art, Paris, France. The vast archival resources dedicated to the Ugolin is a testament to the endurance of the work within the early scholarship. The Institut National d'Histoire de l’Art houses a number of manuscripts by Clément-Carpeaux that discuss her father’s time in Rome and the genesis of the Ugolin. 5
is suggestive of their preoccupation with Carpeaux’s education at the Villa Medici, the French
Academy’s outpost in Rome, and the classical roots of his oeuvre.9
The later twentieth century situated Carpeaux’s oeuvre more fully in relation to the politics of the Second Empire. Anne Wagner’s 1986 Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second
Empire is the only English-language monograph on the artist to date, and its publication dramatically shifted the focus of Carpeaux towards governmental institutions and Napoléon III’s politics. Her approach offers a valuable model through which to examine Carpeaux’s works. For instance, in a chapter titled “Art and Property,” Wagner discusses the Prince Impérial as a case study on how Carpeaux navigated both governmental patronage and the commercial marketplace.
The work depicted the Imperial Prince as a normal bourgeois child rather than as the son of an emperor who was positioned to inherit the throne. The result is an image of immense propagandistic value that, in Wagner’s interpretation, could promote the Bonapartes as a bourgeois family rather than a strictly imperial one.10 One might even suggest that the work mitigates the complexities of Napoléon III’s paradoxical status as a revolutionary and dictator. In addition to being exhibited at the Salon, the work was also a commercial object designed to be reproduced in a number of editions and sold to private buyers. Carpeaux’s commercialization of this image is suggestive of a shift in Napoléon III’s strategy, from securing the support of the working class to that of the bourgeoisie. Although the Prince Impérial was a critical and commercial failure,
Wagner nonetheless uses Carpeaux’s navigation of public and private patronage to locate him securely within the politics of the Second Empire.
9 Mehdi Korchane ed., Michel-Ange au siècle de Carpeaux (Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, 2012). This 2012 exhibition put on by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes titled Michel-Ange au siècle de Carpeaux and its accompanying catalog are prime examples of this trend continuing into the twenty-first century.
10 Wagner, 192. 6
Although the Fontaine appears only briefly in its conclusion, Wagner’s text provides a valuable starting point from which to examine the work. She identifies in the Fontaine an unorthodox materiality and sensuousness that is indicative of Carpeaux’s eagerness to break from sculptural conventions. His bodies, despite being classicized, effectively reject the kind of idealized forms favored by the Académie in favor of a more realist type that is particular to its subject—even when, as in this case, the subjects are allegorical. The palpable physicality and ethnographic realism of the four figures that represent the continents in the Fontaine lend the monument to the post-colonial approach taken in this thesis.
The cursory scholarly attention given to the Fontaine is mirrored in Albert Boime’s 1987
Hollow Icons: The Politics of Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France, in which he began a brief but important discussion of its racial iconography in relation to French imperial politics. 11 Boime specifically notes that the figure of Europe seems to bear the celestial sphere with comparative ease. Suggesting that the armillary sphere visually subjugates the other three non-European figures, Boime argues that the Fontaine reflected the colonial aspirations of the Second Empire by invoking French histories of astronomy, navigation, and imperialist expansion. Furthermore, stating that the monument “translated the cosmic function of the site into an imperialist dream of world domination,” he reframed the conversation by suggesting the importance of site to our understanding of the Fontaine and Second Empire colonial politics writ large.12
11 Boime, Hollow Icons: The Politics of Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France, 78-83.
12 Boime, 78; As scholarship on Carpeaux has grown slowly, so has the application of critical approaches to his oeuvre. While texts like the Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, edited by James Draper and Édouard Papet, Charmaine A. Nelson’s Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art, and Francisco Bethencourt’s Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century address the Fontaine and its racial imagery at one point or another and to varying degrees, the monument remains relatively underexamined. Consequently, so does its socio-historical and post-colonial complexities vis-à-vis Napoléon III’s empire. 7
This thesis builds upon Wagner’s and Boime’s arguments by analyzing the Fontaine’s iconography vis-à-vis the circumstances of its commission, the symbolism of its site, and its links to Napoléon III’s political strategy. The first chapter provides a historical overview of Napoléon
III’s empire, detailing how his government relied on conservative ideals to legitimate itself and maintain its grip on power. It suggests that his administration employed colonial expansion and urban renewal to ensure the continuation of its rule over France. The second chapter discusses the
Fontaine’s commission and site. It characterizes the sculpture as a site-specific work that illuminates the importance of science to Napoléon III’s colonial strategy, as well as to his framing of his empire as a modern and effective bureaucracy. The final chapter focuses on the racial iconography of the Fontaine, outlining how the monument resonated with conservative Second
Empire ideologies, with emphasis on France’s colonialist agenda. The conclusion suggests how the Fontaine was not only able to survive the dramatic transition between the Second Empire and the Third Republic, but also why Napoléon III’s successors adopted it. The monument serves as a political and visual nexus between these disparate regimes and helps us to begin thinking about the remarkable, and perhaps unexpected, degree of ideological and cultural continuity between them.
8
CHAPTER 1
THE FRENCH EMPIRE UNDER NAPOLLÉON III
When Carpeaux received the commission for the Fontaine in 1867, support for and confidence in the Second Empire had already been declining since the late 1850s.13 Fears of war with Prussia, ever-increasing costs of France’s military activities abroad, and high taxes that the emperor demanded to finance Haussmann’s project raised some serious concerns over Napoléon
III’s ability to rule.14 In the face of growing public frustration with the regime and an increasingly fracturing political and social climate, the emperor took steps to associate his empire with the legacies of past regimes, chiefly that of his uncle, Napoléon I.15 This chapter traces the vicissitudes in Napoléon III’s claim to power, from his appointment as president of the Second Republic in
1848 to his seizure of power in the 1852 coup d’état, and throughout his time as emperor. It shows how the Second Empire maintained a façade of progressivism as it continued to deepen its authoritarianism, conservatism, and colonialism over the course of its reign, and how the Fontaine participated in and visually articulated this evolution.
Despite the Second Empire’s vocal and outward championing of progressivism, the regime built and sustained itself through conservative political ideals. Napoléon III’s ascent to power lay in his ability to convince the French populace of his commitment to republican ideals, and his reign as emperor began with his continued advocacy of these ideas. He nonetheless relied on authoritarianism to resolve France’s social and political instabilities. Entering into the 1860s, the
Second Empire became increasingly authoritarian as it continued to outwardly champion
13 Price, The French Second Empire, 267.
14 Ibid., 267.
15 Carroll, “Imperial Ideologies in the Second Empire,” 73. 9
progressive ideals, while it increasingly undermined them in practice. Carpeaux’s Fontaine, which was commissioned in this later period, embodies the regime’s complex ideological stance.
The Rise of Napoléon III
As the Bonapartes were forced into exile upon Napoléon I’s removal from power, Charles-
Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, also known as Louis-Napoléon, spent his youth exiled from France.
Even before he became Emperor of the French, Louis-Napoléon’s political career and philosophy on statecraft were deeply impacted by the events of his uncle’s reign. In 1832, his father Napoléon
François Joseph Charles Bonaparte, the son of Napoléon I and Marie-Louise of Austria, passed away. As the de facto heir to the Bonaparte dynasty, Louis-Napoléon firmly believed that it was his destiny to assume power and restore France to the Napoleonic state that his uncle had first established in 1804.16 This personal destiny was one rooted in his upbringing, through which he understood his duty as being “first to the Napoleonic dynasty, and then to France.”17
Louis-Napoléon’s rise from political exile to the president of the Second French Republic and finally to Emperor of the French can be traced back to a mid-nineteenth century crisis that provided him with the conditions necessary to assume power. The July Monarchy, established in
1830 and headed by King Louis-Philippe, had begun to collapse in 1845 from a combination of forces, including a deep public distrust in the government, economic difficulties, and mass unemployment. The result was widespread fear and uncertainty that culminated in February 1848, when a demonstration in Paris devolved into a fully-fledged revolution, during which a small group of republicans took advantage of the collapsing government and assumed power, establishing the
16 Price, The Second French Empire 16.
17 Ibid., 44. 10
Second French Republic.18 As Roger Price argues, the introduction of male suffrage in a moment of chaos and universal malaise worsened the existing deep divisions between social classes and political groups. Landowners, for instance, were afraid of the consequences of enfranchising the propertyless classes. 19 Social tensions, combined with poorly-run elections and disorganized parties, led to further civil unrest that resulted in another insurrection in June, during which the army and other forces were deployed to maintain order in Paris.20 Learning of these revolutions and the establishment of a new republic, as well as of the latter’s increasing instability, Louis-
Napoléon returned to France. He launched his presidential campaign by exploiting “the potency of the Bonapartist legend” among a population weary of revolution and in search of a savior.21 He won the election in December of 1848 from overwhelming support from the peasantry and began his tenure as the president of the Republic.22
From the beginning of his reign, Louis-Napoléon made efforts to prolong his grip on power. The continuing turmoil within France and the administration of the Second Republic offered a prime opportunity for him to campaign for an amendment to the constitution, which limited his presidency to a single term. As the government continued to struggle to maintain order between competing political groups and social classes, politicians from across the spectrum became increasingly willing to grant the president a second term.23 However, the constitutional revision did not receive the three-quarters majority vote that was required in the National
18 Price, The Second French Empire, 11.
19 Ibid., 13.
20 Ibid., 14.
21 Ibid., 9.
22 Ibid., 18.
23 Ibid., 26. 11
Assembly. Louis-Napoléon was nonetheless in a strong position to mount a coup d’état and took advantage of the considerable power he wielded over the army and law enforcement to seize power on December 2nd, 1851. The following year, he officially reinstated the French Empire and crowned himself Napoléon III.
Because his mandate from the French people was largely illusory, Napoléon III was forced to continually reinforce his legitimacy as France’s rightful ruler so as to preserve the façade of republicanism and stave off further revolution. He understood that his popularity lay in his ability to position himself as the embodiment of revolutionary ideals, and worked to emphasize this in his messaging throughout his reign. For example, following the dissolution of the National Assembly during his 1851 coup, he claimed that his sole duty was “to preserve the Republic and save the country by invoking the solemn judgment of the only sovereign [he recognized] in France, the people.” 24 At the same time, however, he emulated the First Empire, employing several policies that his uncle had executed in order to maintain stability and preserve the public order. 25 He clamped down on all aspects of participatory democracy, such as by outlawing political parties and by deploying on the police to censor free speech and suppress opposition, especially from the urban working classes.26 Throughout his reign, Napoléon III’s approach to governance was a constant juggling act of drawing from Napoléon I enough to capitalize on his uncle’s legacy, while maintaining a safe distance from the perceived flaws of the First Empire.
His self-fashioning as the inheritor of the revolution and his willingness to model his empire after those of the past to achieve his goals of legitimizing himself, maintaining order, and
24 Roger Price, Documents on The Second French Empire, 1852-1870 (London, UK: Palgrave, 2015), 8.
25 Carroll, 71.
26 Price, The Second French Empire, 146-153. 12
restoring the glory of the French Empire manifested domestically and internationally. At home, he invested in infrastructure, focusing on reconstructing Paris and turning it into a modern capital city with the help of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. On the international stage, he pursued opportunities to restore France’s hegemonic status, which it lost when Napoléon Bonaparte was defeated in 1815 at Waterloo by a coalition led by the United Kingdom.27
Haussmannization: Rebuilding Paris in the Second Empire
Domestically, Napoléon III deployed the machinery of the government to support his right to rule, including through public art, public works projects, and urban planning, so as to produce a total environment that could project his legitimacy and power. His project to beautify Paris, commissioned in 1853 and carried out by Baron Haussmann, is especially important as it reshaped the political heart of his empire to his own needs. Napoléon III advertised the project as providing a two-fold benefit to the French by improving the well-being of all of Paris’s residents regardless of class or background, and by creating a capital city worthy of the envy of all others.28
Prior to the 1850s, Paris had been plagued with a host of problems regarding hygiene and sanitation that were thought to be caused by outdated infrastructure.29 Winding and narrow streets made for a difficult experience traversing the city, buildings blocked sunlight, and the Seine was undrinkable, having been heavily polluted for centuries. Additionally, many saw the city as being unfit to promote and facilitate commerce, as its urban layout prevented the formation of effective
27 Carroll, 68.
28 Heath Massey Schenker, “Parks and Politics During the Second Empire in Paris,” Landscape Journal 14, No. 2 (Fall 2015): 201.
29 Richard A. Etlin, Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and its Legacy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 9. 13
communications networks.30 Eighteenth-century writers and commentators understood that the embellishment of Paris, by way of improved infrastructure and increased public green spaces, was critical to improving the health of its residents and economy. Haussmann’s project addressed these issues through the creation of new roads, parks, and squares, to improve traffic and reduce congestion, as well as to provide Paris’s residents with better access to sunlight and air. New sewers and an updated water delivery system also ensured improved water quality that reduced the spread of diseases, as did the destruction of densely-populated poorer districts, which were perceived to be breeding grounds for sickness.
Although Haussmann’s project appeared simply to respond to these issues that had plagued the city, opponents of Napoléon III’s regime argued that it was a politicized program designed to appease the bourgeoisie and to control the working classes. Critics wrote about how the widened boulevards were designed to make it easier for troops to access quartiers where disturbances from the working classes historically had arisen.31 The destruction of poorer districts displaced the working classes to the peripheries of the city, thereby reducing their ability to organize and revolt.32
In doing so, Haussmann and Napoléon III effectively created a bourgeois core within a city designed to keep the working classes out.
The separation of the classes is evident in how parks and wide streets were used to delineate contrasting quartiers of the city from one another. While the parks were advertised as public spaces for the benefit of all of Paris’s residents, the fences and locked gates of these parks literally barred the working classes from them. Workers were unable to afford to travel to and from these spaces
30 Nicholas Papayanis, Planning Paris Before Haussmann (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 54.
31 Heath Schenker, “Parks and Politics During the Second Empire in Paris,” 202.
32 Schekner, 203. 14
by carriage or on horseback, and their jobs prevented them from accessing them during opening hours.33 Although they provided fresh air and greenery, these spaces were strategically placed throughout the city as boundaries that separated the bourgeoisie from the working classes. Prior to
Haussmannization, social-class stratification occurred within buildings, in which ground floors were occupied by businesses, lower floors occupied by bourgeois families, and the garrets being occupied by working-class tenants. Through Haussmannization, the wealthy were able to establish their own neighborhoods distinct from those of the working classes, thus avoiding “the poverty and dirt of ‘diseased Paris’ from invading the space of ‘Metropolitan Paris.”34
As contemporaneous critics and modern-day scholars have noted, Haussmannization was a thinly-veiled tool that Napoléon III deployed to maintain power. By redesigning the city to cater to wealthy industrialists and landowners, the emperor could appeal to those who owned the means of production while simultaneously presenting the lower classes with spaces that were theirs in appearance only. Placed within this charged space, Carpeaux’s Fontaine participated directly in
Napoléon III’s efforts to rebuild the capital in line with his political strategies.
Napoléon III’s Overseas Empire
In addition to commissioning ambitious public works projects at home, Napoléon III expanded the scope of French imperialism to maintain his grip on power domestically, and to extend his international influence. The impact of Napoléon I’s legacy on Napoléon III’s imperial policy cannot be understated; in his 1839 Des idées napoléoniennes, Napoléon III claimed that his uncle’s aims for a European confederation, with France at its helm, strongly resonated with him.
33 Schenker, 213.
34 Ibid., 206. 15
He even reasoned that circumstances had forced his uncle to advance too rapidly in warfare and that he would have been successful had he more time to focus on the subtle intricacies of empire- building.35
It stands to reason that Napoléon III began his reign refraining from direct conquests. At the beginning of the Second Empire, he relied on a more ideological form of imperialism, fashioning himself as the defender of nationalities in Europe and, by extension, the defender of peace on the continent.36 His international engagements were designed to signal to his neighbors that his only goals were to spread freedom and ensure peace in Europe. In a famous 1852 speech in Bordeaux, Napoléon III promised that, under his reign, “L’empire, c’est la paix,” or “the Empire is peace.” 37 In addition to sending troops to Italy in 1859 to support Victor Emmanuel II’s campaign against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Napoléon III was also actively engaged in establishing diplomatic ties with other European powers, including Great Britain, Russia, and
Prussia. In 1856, he hosted the Congress of Paris and led peace talks between the powers involved in the Crimean War of 1853.38 In this initial phase of the Second Empire, Napoléon III defined his government as one that integrated revolutionary principles with imperialism to spread its progressive ideology to its European neighbors.39
In the 1860s, however, Napoléon III changed his foreign policy strategy. Envisioning his empire as the heir to that of the Romans, he recast the Second Empire as a multinational colonial
35 William E. Echard, Napoleon III and the Concert of Europe (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 3.
36 Carroll, 71.
37 Roger Price, The French Second Empire, 405.
38 Echard, Napoleon III and the Concert of Europe, 58-72.
39 Echard, 73. 16
empire. Drawing from the legacy of the Romans, Napoléon III saw France, Italy, and Spain as being natural allies, united by a common latinité, a Roman cultural heritage. Citing his uncle’s commentaries on Julius Caesar, Napoléon III saw war and imperialism as necessary to consolidate the increasingly fracturing and divided climate of his empire, and pointed out that “in the aftermath of revolution, an external war was necessary… to amalgamate the remains of all the parties.”40
Having undergone a period of internal conflict and distrust, France needed an external enemy to recalibrate its identity and unite its citizens against. For Napoléon III, who vowed against taking unnecessary and aggressive actions against his European neighbors, colonialism offered a solution: since he could not expand his empire within Europe, he would do so overseas.
This more colonialist and expansionary vision for the Second Empire manifested in
Napoléon III’s attempt to establish Ferdinand Maximilian as the emperor of Mexico. By the time of Napoléon III’s ascent to power, the British Empire had taken much of France’s previously-held territories in the New World. Although Napoléon I, in the aftermath of his defeat in Egypt, acquired
Louisiana from Spain in his attempt to take the Americas and re-establish New France, he sold the land to the United States in 1803.41 In Mexico, Napoléon III returned to an aggressive and overtly imperial version of the French Empire from which he had previously distanced himself. Unlike in
Italy, where he sent his troops to support an independence movement, Mexico was an independent state that the emperor invaded, and one in which he instituted a new ruler and a new form of government.42 Drawing on the concept of latinité, Napoléon III cast Mexico as part of this shared
40 Roger Price, The French Second Empire, 406.
41 Frederick Quinn, The French Overseas Empire (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2000), 77.
42 Carroll, 75. 17
“Latin” heritage. 43 There, his military conquest derived its rationale from the cultural and ideological associations that he made between his regime and that of the Romans.
Napoléon III’s attempts to unite the Latin nations comprised one part of a broader mission civilisatrice, a “civilizing mission” that can be traced to as far back as the seventeenth century when French overseas activity was defined in religious rather than political terms. For instance, the 1603 charter of the Acadian colony in New France was an explicit “attempt, with divine assistance, to bring the peoples…. To the knowledge of the true God, to civilize them, and to instruct them in the faith.”44 Napoléon III’s conquests in Southeast Asia, where his activities in
Siam and Vietnam continued the work begun by past monarchs, may be read in similar terms. In particular, the diplomatic relationship that the Second Empire shared with the Siamese Kingdom built upon the ties that Louis XIV developed with his Siamese counterpart a century prior.
Likewise, Napoléon III’s colonial entanglements in Asia were an extension of the religious work that missionaries had carried out almost three decades earlier. In 1839, the Vatican awarded France a significant missionary role in Asia, allowing them to gain a foothold in China and Vietnam, among other countries in the region.45 His forces later captured and occupied Saigon and three adjourning provinces in 1861, and declared a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863, creating the nucleus of colonial territories that later would become French Indochina.46
This chapter shows the need for a socio-historical examination of the Fontaine that securely locates it within the Second Empire’s relationship with its subjects in France, as well as with its
43 Nancy Barker, “The Factor of ‘Race’ in the French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861,” The Hispanic American Review 59 (February 1979): 64-80.
44 Quinn, The French Overseas Empire, 5.
45 Quinn, 135.
46 Ibid., 147. 18
relationship to the European and global communities. As support for the empire undulated and eventually plummeted, Napoléon III tapped deeper into authoritarian and colonial politics to maintain the integrity of his administration. Being commissioned in the final years of the Second
Empire and simultaneously responding to its earlier imperial agenda, the Fontaine's iconography and site seem to have significant consequences for our understanding of how Napoléon III adjusted and re-envisioned his regime.
19
CHAPTER 2
MAPPING THE FONTAINE
The Fontaine was placed at a particularly meaningful node within the politically-charged urban geometry of Haussmannized Paris: it lies on the Paris meridian and along an axis demarcated by buildings that embody French scientific and political authority. On one end of this axis lies the
Paris Observatory, founded in 1667 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, King Louis XIV’s minister of finance. Colbert recognized the benefits of having a sophisticated, powerful, and precise observatory for the French kingdom’s internal and international affairs. In the time of the Fontaine, the Observatory may be read as a junction connecting the Second Empire to a long history of
French scientific achievement. On the other end of the axis, the Luxembourg Palace and its gardens, built by Marie de’ Medici, the second wife of Henri IV, linked Carpeaux’s monument to the powerful royal dynasties. Carpeaux’s sculpture thus stands quite literally at the intersection of science, politics, and urban planning.
Through Haussmann’s projects, Napoléon III’s capital city was reconstructed in the manner of French royal architecture, thus connecting the Fontaine and its surroundings to the history of French rulers. The broader urban network that the Fontaine is placed in is aligned with the values of scientific authority and supremacy inherent to the monument’s site. Through the
Fontaine’s site and relationships, Napoléon III mined the history of France and combined a distinctly French architectural vocabulary with his ambitions for the future of the French Empire as a modern and effective global hegemonic force.
20
Haussmannized Paris: A Symbolic Space for the Fontaine
Although Haussmannization is often discussed as a distinctly modern phenomenon and as an emblem of France’s assertion of its status as a modern nation, it was also designed to recall axial city planning forms adopted by French absolutist monarchs in the seventeenth century.
Described by Spiro Kostof as a “Grand Manner” of Baroque urban design, these principles were largely developed in Italy with the intent to reinforce a hierarchy in which the ruler was supreme and absolute.47 The hallmarks of this style include straight streets that aid the state in maintaining order; uniformity and standardization to convey a sense of regulation and rationality of character; a rectilinear urban layout that creates urban order; ceremonial axes that physically manifest power in the design of the city; and spatial expansiveness that “presupposes an unentangled decision- making process.”48 These elements were deployed to centralize and control the experience of residents and visitors from the moment that they entered the city.49
Exemplified by Louis XIV’s palace and gardens at Versailles, the Grand Manner promotes a single and powerful idea: the King as the State, or in Louis XIV’s own words, “L’état, c’est moi”—“I am the state.” While historians have questioned the authenticity of this quote, it nonetheless expresses well Louis XIV’s philosophy on statecraft and approach to urban design.
As he wrote, “[our subjects] make up a part of ourselves, since we are the head of a body of which they are the members.”50 Louis XIV expanded what had been Louis XIII’s hunting lodge and
47 Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Throughout History (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1991), 215.
48 Kostof, 217, 230-275.
49 Ibid., 224.
50 James D. Hebert, “Louis XIV’s Versailles,” in Our Distance from God: Studies of the Divine and Mundane in Western Art and Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 27. 21
transformed it into his principal royal residence starting in 1661, effectively making it into the political heart of the French kingdom. This symbolic and ceremonial head of the French state is the primary architectural, spatial, and political convergence point of Versailles, from and to which all traffic and power flowed.51 The palace is accessible by the Avenue de Saint-Cloud and Avenue de Sceaux, which converge on either side of the Place d’Armes, a broad plaza that takes one to the steps of the main palace. Between these two avenues is the Avenue de Paris, which does not only converge on this plaza and the palace but also forms the primary axis of the palace and its gardens.
Israël Silvestre’s drawing from around 1690 shows the convergence of these three avenues, and
Pierre Le Pature’s map of the town and palace from 1717 shows how the principles identified by
Kostof were applied to the grounds to express and direct power (Fig. 10-11).
We also see in the layout of Versailles the beginnings of a scientifically-informed architectural approach. As Kostof notes, Grand Manner design was developed in tandem with both the rise of authoritarianism and advances in astronomy that understood the universe as heliocentric.52 Even in the eighteenth century, political theology and cosmology intersected with science. As James D. Herbert states, Christian mysticism and metaphysics permeate Western cultural production, and the scientific and divine often intersect. Indeed, Elizabeth A. Johnson describes medieval political theology and cosmology as bringing “God, humanity, and the world into an ordered harmony” that pervaded European thought for centuries, even long after scientific advances discredited this worldview.
51 Louis de Rouvroy, The Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon on the Reign of Louis XIC and the Regency, trans. Bayle St. John (London, UK: Chapman & Hall, 1857), Volume III; Ralph E. Giesey, “Models of Rulership in French Royal Ceremonial,” in Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages, ed. Sean Wilentz (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press), 41-64. These texts, among others, examine the well-documented ceremonial and ritualized life at Versailles.
52 Kostof, 215. 22
The rationality of this order was reflected in geometry, especially in medieval cosmological images, such as Hildegard of Bingen’s 12th-century well-known Universal Man (Fig. 12). Created in the image of God, the figure of Man is inscribed inside a circle, the perfect shape. Similarly, medieval theologians represented the earthly realm through the square to reflect its quadripartite nature—the four winds, the four corners, and the four parts that St. Thomas Aquinas and others identified as constituting our world.53 This motif of perfection of God, represented by the circle, and man the microcosm, represented by the square, is exemplified by a diagram in Thomas of
Cantimpré’s 1295 Encyclopedia (Fig. 13).54 This idea would manifest in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous image of the Vitruvian Man, whose bodily proportions fit inside a square, itself residing within a circle (Fig. 14).
At Versailles, Louis XIV deployed this sacred geometry in his palace and landscape architecture to make himself the center of the French body politic. As Johnson notes, the
Copernican model of the universe that understood the earth as not an infinite space, but as a single body that orbited the sun, did not disrupt medieval theological and cosmological thought but was rather made to fit into it. Louis XIV’s emulation of the classical Greek god Apollo equated his divine kingship to a deity that symbolized the sun, understood by then to be the cosmic center of all things. The main palace, a symbol of Louis XIV, is surrounded by an idealized and cultivated garden to the west and the town to the east. Like the earth that is physically and gravitationally bound to the sun, his citizens and subjects are subservient to him. Exemplified by the royal urban planning philosophy at Versailles, the French absolutist monarchs used geometry and
53 Marian Kurdziałek and Hugh McDonald, “Medieval Doctrines on Man as Image of the World,” Roczniki Filozoficzne/Annales de Philosophe/Annals of Philosophy 62, No. 4 (2014): 225.
54 Marie-Thérèse D’Alverny, “Le Cosmos Symbolique du XXIe Siècle,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 20 (1995): 79. 23
mathematical order in their architecture to express divine power. In nineteenth-century Paris,
Napoléon III employed a similar strategy to that of Louis XIV, using the symbolism of the built environment to express his right to rule. What Kostof calls “the urbanism of dominion” is evident, for example, in the convergence of twelve streets at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.55 Like the Sun
King’s equivalence of landscape and urban architecture, Napoléon III’s city uses an axial and geometric urban layout to express power and legitimacy to its residents, thus communicating his right to rule and implicitly connecting him to other absolutist regimes.
However, while Louis XIV and other monarchs positioned themselves as divine rulers,
Napoléon III made science a powerful and visible part of his regime and emulated his uncle, who took the same approach. Napoléon I applied a model of scientific rationality to the tradition of the sacred and divine king, such as when he visited sick soldiers during his campaign in Egypt and
Syria that lasted from 1798 to 1801. Throughout the campaign, Napoléon I and his officers called the disease a “fever” rather than a “plague,” which demonstrates the rational approach that he took to managing the issue—it was understood that, while plagues were contagious, fevers were not.
Part of this effort to dispel of fears of contagion is seen in Napoléon I’s willingness to come into physical contact with ailing soldiers. Antoine-Jean Gros depicted this moment in his 1804
Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa (Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa) (Fig.
15).56 Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby notes that Gros’s work depicts Napoléon I mirroring the roi thaumaturge, the healing king’s sacred touch, that past monarchs exhibited as part of their divine identity. As rulers chosen by God, monarchs like Henri IV, Louis XIV, Louis XV, and even
55 Kostof, 271.
56 Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804),” Representations No. 51 (Summer, 1995): 8. 24
Charles X performed the royal touch as evidence of their royal legitimacy and their divine right to rule. What Napoléon I did, however, is not an act of divinity, but an act of rationality that signified his identity as a modern ruler.57
Napoléon III’s urban program exemplifies his attempts to combine the legacy of divine rule with the rational model developed by his uncle. Anthony Vidler argues that Haussmann carried the “techniques of rationalist analysis and the formation of instruments of the ancien régime, as refurbished by the First Empire and its institutions, to their logical extremes.” 58
Haussmann relied on objective and efficient scientific principles and techniques in his approach.
As David Harvey notes, the city was built from “Haussmann’s attachment to the geometry of the straight line and the accuracy of leveling to engineer the flows of water and sewage.”59 The city, as an extension of Napoléon III’s rule, would communicate to France and the world the rational, scientific basis of the Second French Empire.
Imperial Space and Time: The Paris Observatory and Meridian
Haussmann’s emphasis on science and mathematics as signifiers of Napoléon III’s modernity, rationality, and effectiveness is mirrored in the Fontaine’s spatial relationship to the
Paris Observatory and Paris meridian. Placed within Haussmann’s urban network, the monument activated these sites and spaces and resonated with how Napoléon III sought to position himself: a legitimate and modern ruler, armed with the tools necessary to measure and understand the universe, to dominate it, shape it, and have it known through France’s terms.
57 Grigsby, “Rumor, Contagion, and Colonization in Gros’s Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804),” 9.
58 Anthony Vidler, The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays (New York, NY: Monacelli Press, 2011), 91.
59 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), 260. 25
The Paris meridian traces its roots to 1667 with the building of the Paris Observatory under the authority of Louis XIV. The observatory sciences that these institutions were engaged in were linked to navigation and its applications to trade, warfare, and transportation.60 As geographic positioning required knowledge of a standard ‘home’ meridian, and the development of a meridian required the work of astronomers and geodesists, the Paris Observatory became a crucial institution in determining the Paris meridian for the French state. Furthermore, the establishment of a Paris meridian also had domestic applications, such as in railway travel, as it allowed for standardized measurements of time and space within the country, effectively eliminating the confusion of having local and regional variations in practices of measurement.61 The meridian connected the city to the world and placed it longitudinally at zero degrees, effectively making
France a global reference point for space and time. The Fontaine is thus situated along a line that connects Paris, the political, economic, and cultural heart of Napoléon III’s empire, to the global macrocosm.
The placement of the Fontaine in line with the nearby Paris Observatory also activated the intersecting histories of science and politics. This site suggests that the Fontaine actively engaged in a celebration of science as constitutive of statecraft and crucial to Napoléon III’s imperial project. As Maurice Crosland suggests, “French science” must be understood within the framework of state-sponsored institutions. At least in Europe, France was unique in the extent of its nationalization of scientific education and achievement. Louis XIV’s establishment of the
60 Guy Boistel, “Training Seafarers in Astronomy: Methods, Naval Schools, and Naval Observatories in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France,” in The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture, David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg, H. Otto Sibum ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 149.
61 Charles Withers, “International Standards? Metrology and the Regulation of Space and Time, 1787-1884," in Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 107. 26
Académie des Sciences in 1666 demonstrates the French state’s control over scientific research.62
The Académie des Sciences, the parent organization of the Paris Observatory, is the manifestation and embodiment of French scientific authority, as well as an allegory of the mastery of the natural world that the French state saw itself as wielding.63 Throughout its history, the Académie would be recruited by the French state for military purposes, such as to aid in Napoléon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt and Syria.
The Paris Observatory played a particularly important role in the development of the observatory and earth sciences for political, military, and economic pursuits.64 Metrology, the science of measurement, which is at the heart of the work of observatories, is itself an expression of political power. By measuring its territory relative to those of the British to aid in its domestic and international pursuits, the French government not only claimed what it saw as existing within its borders, but it also worked to produce units and standards of measurements that it expected its neighbors to follow. These complex connections between metrology and the meridian with politics are apparent in the French “invention” of the meter, derived from the meridian in 1791, and in its hoped-for ratification as an international standard.65 The Times (London) would even lament in
62 It is also worth noting that the Académie des Sciences lies just beyond this axis, and that the Louvre, which housed the Académie in its early years also lies in the path of the Paris meridian. While this geometry is not an explicit ceremonial axis in the way that Kostof describes it, it nonetheless expresses power and legitimacy in the way that Kostof’s axes do.
63 Maurice Crosland, Science Under Control: The French Academy of Sciences, 1795-1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12.
64 Martina Schiavon, “Geodesy and Mapmaking in France and Algeria: Between Army Officers and Observatory Scientists,” in The Heavens on Earth: Observatories and Astronomy in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture, David Aubin, Charlotte Bigg, H. Otto Sibum, ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 208.
65 Schiavon, 120. 27
1861 the possibility of the “complete assimilation of all our weights and measures to the French system.”66
The Observatory’s contributions to geography were especially important to this creation of a “French space.”67 France as an entity had been shaped and reshaped over centuries as territories were lost and conquered, annexed, and integrated into its political and administrative structure, the center of which was Paris. This resulted in strong regional personalities and traditions, many of which clashed against those set by Paris and understood by Paris as “French.”68 The conception of
France as a body of people united according to their own will and sharing a common identity of
“Frenchness” was thus “dubiously applicable.” 69 Geography and geographical education performed an ideological work to reshape France from an inert place to an intentional shared and collective social, political, cultural, and economic space.70 There are, of course, resonances that the creation of a unified French space have to Napoléon III’s broader mission to remedy France’s political and social divisions, a mission in which the Fontaine had participated.
In addition to giving France the scientific and philosophical means to “create” itself, the
Observatory, in developing cosmography and the observatory sciences, also allowed France to define and measure its colonial interests. The work of the institution is inherently colonial, as colonialism operated not simply through political, military, and economic domination, but also through academic, intellectual, and scientific intervention into and mastery of the natural world.
66 Schiavon, 131.
67 Dana Kristofor Lindaman, Becoming French: Mapping the Geographies of French Identity, 1871-1914 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 5.
68 Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976): 485.
69 Weber, 485.
70 Ibid. 28
Notably, the Paris Observatory played a crucial role in extending the Paris meridian past the
Mediterranean and into Africa. Martina Schiavon discusses Captain François Perrier, a military officer trained at the École Polytechnique, who worked on the geodetic junction of France and
Britain to establish precise borders between the two nations.71 During the Third Republic, Perrier led a project to revise the meridian and its junction with Algeria, so as to increase the accuracy of the Paris meridian for future colonial exploits in North Africa.72
The sciences also fueled “French exceptionalism” and racial supremacism that justified these pursuits. The development of social sciences such as anthropology also took the white French
(and European) race as the standard from which to study all other races, resulting inevitably in a
French conception of racial superiority that justified French colonial intervention and involvement in America, Africa, and Asia. These disciplines and sciences—natural, physical, and social—must be viewed not as separate or discrete, but as two parts of a whole that is the French institution of science. The placement of the Fontaine attests to the union of the sciences with state politics and its importance to Napoléon III, in both how it enabled the French to go overseas to colonize and how it generated nationalistic sentiments and recalled the history of French exceptionalism.
The Luxembourg Gardens: Botany, the Cultivation of Power, and the Staging of Colonialism
The Fontaine’s placement in the Luxembourg Palace and its gardens relates the monument to a long tradition of French royalty using palace and landscape architecture to communicate their power. The Luxembourg Palace’s original inhabitant, Marie de’ Medici, began construction on the palace and its gardens between 1612 and 1615 as a project to self-fashion her public image as a
71 Schiavon, 208.
72 Ibid., 212. 29
rightful member of the French court.73 Although smaller in scale, the Luxembourg Palace and its gardens are the ideological predecessors to Louis XIV’s project at Versailles. There is, indeed, a direct axial connection that the Luxembourg Palace and its gardens share with those of Versailles.
Additionally, the placement of the Fontaine within this space allowed the monument to activate historically and colonially significant spaces of cultivated nature.
In addition to the physical axial layout of palaces and their gardens, the gardens themselves were communicative tools that French monarchs used to affirm their rule. The royal gardens at
Versailles, which abound in sculptures and hydraulic displays, present a powerful example of this tradition. The garden was a specifically charged site—the wealth, time, space, care, and social stability it took for royal gardens to grow made them inherently political spaces.74 It was only during peacetime won by military and diplomatic victories that gardens could be built, maintained, and expanded. The flowers in these gardens serve as a rather significant expression of power. The sheer number of flowers that were planted at the gardens was indicative of the patron’s wealth.
Elizabeth Hyde notes how, at the Trianon alone, Louis XIV spent over 36,639 livres on flowers for the 1686-90 expansion, and that a 1693 plan for the garden called for the planting of an additional 96,000 plants and bulbs. 75 Additionally, flowers were widely-known symbols of abundance, fertility, and “perpetual springtime” that frequently appeared in classical literature.76
Louis XIV exploited the symbolic value of these flowers, as well as their significance to the
73 Alexandra Lyons Greer, “The Construction of a Florentine Queen in Paris: The Building of Marie de Médicis’s Image in the Luxembourg Palace.” (Ph.D. dissertation, Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh, 2016), 22.
74 William Howard Adams, The French Garden, 1500-1800 (London, UK: Scolar, 1979), 6.
75 Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture, and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2005), 156.
76 Hyde, Cultivated Nature, 171-2. 30
classical world, by deploying them as backdrops for fêtes champêtres and fêtes galantes, garden parties in which the nobility took part. At these gatherings and among the classically-inspired sculptures, hydraulics, and landscapes of Versailles, Louis XIV and the nobility engaged in a sort of play-acting, wherein they saw themselves as inheritors of the imperial ambitions of the Roman
Empire.77 Re-envisioning his kingdom as an heir to Rome and making the nobility key players in this fantasy, Louis XIV simultaneously expressed the power of his regime and made allies of potential enemies.
The sculptural program at Versailles is especially important for this study of the Fontaine, as it directly influenced the monument’s composition. Although Carpeaux did not design the equestrian sculptures that accompany his primary group, it is worth noting the formal similarities between the Fontaine and the Bassin d’Apollon (The Fountain of Apollo) (Fig. 16). The centerpiece of the Bassin d’Apollon was designed by Jean-Baptiste Tuby in 1671 and depicts
Apollo riding a four-horse chariot as he rises from the sea, in-tune with Louis XIV’s identification with the Sun God. While Tuby’s work depicts Apollo’s chariot, and Fremiet’s depicts “sea horses”—or rather, horses whose lower-halves resemble those of fish—the formal mirroring of equestrian creatures emerging from water is difficult to ignore. This motif is significant, given that
Davioud initially conceived a Chariot of Apollo to accompany Carpeaux’s sculptural group “in the great tradition of Versailles.”78 Although the Second Empire decided against this, its patronage of a work that nonetheless quotes from Versailles suggests the degree to which it consciously placed its monuments in conversation with those of the French absolutist monarchies.
77 Chandra Mukerji, “Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles,” Public Culture 24, No. 3 (September, 2012): 511.
78 Laure de Margerie, “Fountain of the Observatory,” in The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, ed. James David Draper and Eduoard Papet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 156. 31
The garden setting also linked the Fontaine with Napoléon III’s colonial program.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, a “Green Wave” brought Europeans into contact with flora from distant territories. As the observatory, earth, and naval sciences developed, increasing cross- cultural contact allowed the French to diversify their knowledge of, and access to, global plant life.
The resulting development of horticulture as a distinct field of study in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a testament to the colonial roots of the discipline.79 Popularized by Empress
Eugénie and practiced by the bourgeoisie, the collection, cultivation, and study of exotic plants has strong colonial undertones, and may even be read as an allegory for the interruption, study, and control of native populations. The very act of cultivating nature and creating spaces for such a purpose is itself an expression of power. This celebration of the role of the sciences in advancing colonial policies is important, given the influence that botany and horticulture enjoyed over the
French state, especially beginning in the 1830s when horticultural societies and publications began to increase in number and membership.80 Organizations like the Société Zoologique d’Acclimation and the Société d’anthropologie were formed specifically to study colonial flora and fauna, so as to provide the French state with information regarding the geographical landscape of its colonial interests. While small, these organizations were actively collecting plants and animals, displaying them at expositions, and setting up botanical gardens and agricultural programs in territories like
Saigon.81
The association of these spaces of cultivated nature with science and colonialism is illustrated in the Expositions Universelles. This allows for further consideration of how Napoléon
79 Colta Ives, Public Parks, Private Gardens: Paris to Provence (New York, NY: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 4.
80 Ives, 79.
81 Quinn, 167. 32
III found in these spaces a powerful communicative tool that the French monarchs developed.
Hosting the first of these global events in 1885, as well as a second in 1867, the emperor was able to celebrate the achievements of his regime and to advertise his new city to a global audience.
Although the Champ de Mars is not technically a garden, it is a cultivated green space that housed prominent cultural, technological, and racial Exposition displays. The significance of the expositions for Napoléon III’s politics extends beyond the events themselves and is evident in the lasting impact that these temporary events had on French colonial policy and administration.
Because few in France had traveled overseas, the displays at these expositions were a powerful communicative tool that the Second Empire could use, not only to bring the world to France but also to frame it in such a way that would support the empire’s goals. The 1855 exposition was a watershed moment in French colonialism, as it was the first time that a majority of French citizens, who could not or had not traveled outside of France, could gain a first-hand experience of the colonies.82
By attending to the meanings embedded within the Fontaine’s placement, it becomes clear that scientific institutions and organizations were important to Napoléon III’s colonial politics. The emphasis on science as a hallmark of his regime reflects his preoccupation with framing his regime as one of rationality and order to undo the steady decline that his empire had been experiencing.
Within the symbolic space of Haussmannized Paris and through its site, the Fontaine reveals how
Napoléon III engaged with the past, and for what purpose: to legitimate himself by resonating himself with royalty and divinity, while using science to designate himself as rational, modern, and effective.
82 Sandrine Lemaire, Pascal Blanchard and Nicolas Bancel, “Milestones in Colonial Culture under the Second Empire (1851-1870),” in Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution, ed. Pascal Blanchard, Sandrine Lemaire, Nicolas Bancel, Dominic Thomas (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 78. 33
CHAPTER 3
THE FONTAINE’S RACIAL ICONOGRAPHY
In addition to its site, the Fontaine’s iconography—above all, its four allegorical figures— communicated Napoléon III’s ambitions as a global hegemon. This chapter examines the racial and colonial implications of the iconography of Carpeaux’s sculptural group by considering how the work created meaning within the political, cultural, and colonial context of Napoléon III’s empire. There is a colonial politics inherent to the racial iconography of the four continents supporting a celestial sphere that is compounded when considering the visual and compositional choices that Carpeaux made when producing this work. The continents are distinguished from one another via a combination of ethnographically verisimilar physiognomy and external accouterments: Europe as racially white, America as an indigenous American, depicted with a headdress and earrings, Asia as a vaguely East Asian woman with braided hair, and Africa as a recently-freed black African with earrings and broken shackles on her right foot.
Given the importance of science to Napoléon III’s public image, it makes sense that
Carpeaux would produce a monument for the Second Empire in the realist style described by Anne
Wagner. Rather than presenting idealized figures, the monument depicts bodies that react and respond to the world in ways that real bodies do. Europe spreads her arms to suspend the celestial sphere above her head and looks upwards, and her calm demeanor and steady, graceful contrapposto suggests a sense of ease. Africa is placed opposite Europe and compositionally mirrors her—while Europe faces the north toward the Luxembourg Palace, Africa looks to the south and faces the Paris Observatory. However, whereas Europe supports the weight of her body and the sphere on the toes of both of her feet, Africa firmly plants her right foot, producing a less graceful contrapposto. Additionally, Africa’s face betrays the difficulty with which she completes
34
her task. America shares a similar expression of discomfort as her neck is twisted, and her body is contorted into an uncomfortable position from which she awkwardly carries the sphere, revealing the glaring muscularity of her back. Asia is similarly hunched over in an awkward position as her body twists to accommodate the pose she is forced into. The realism of these figures suited the
Second Empire’s approach to colonial domination by linking Carpeaux’s style to scientific and ethnographic study. However, the complexities of the Fontaine’s composition lie in how Carpeaux combined this allegory, which is inherently hierarchical, with the visually and compositionally equalizing structure of the monument.
Carpeaux’s Allegory of the Four Continents
While the iconography of a grouping of figures supporting a sphere is hardly new, an analysis of Carpeaux’s treatment of this motif exposes contradictions inherent to the Fontaine’s visual program.83 Beginning in the sixteenth century, allegorical figures of the four continents began to populate the title cartouches and borders of European maps of the world.84 As these figures are understood to pictorialize a European conception of the ordering of the races, the most well-known manifestations of the allegory were naturally literal visual top-down hierarchies. First published in 1507, Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first significant printed atlas of the world, presents a notable example (Fig. 17). Relying primarily on external signifiers of race to distinguish these racial types from one another, the frontispiece of Ortelius’s work visually
83 Dirk Kocks, “La Fontaine de l’Observatoire von Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Zur Ikonographie der Kosmos- Vorstellung im 19. Jahrhundert,” Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 38 (1976): 131-144. Kocks puts forth a number of precedents of this theme of an arrangement of figures supporting a sphere.
84 Alex Zukas, “Class, Imperial Space, and Allegorical Figures of the Continents on Early-Modern World Maps,” Environment, Space, Place 10, No. 2 (Fall 2018): 29. 35
places Europe at the top of the racial hierarchy, with Asia and Africa occupying spaces below, and with America being located at the bottom.
Sculptural works like Francesco Bertos’s Allegorical Groups Representing the Four
Continents series, produced between 1710 and 1725, and Aimé-Jules Dalou’s 1867 Caryatids: The
Four Continents show how separating the continents and races from one another in a series of sculptures allows the hierarchy inherent to this allegory to become externally located (Fig. 18-22).
Bertos’s and Dalou’s series include four autonomous sculptural groups, each standing for a continent, and the hierarchical relationships between these allegorical figures exist not within the objects themselves, but rather between them.85 However, in the Fontaine, Carpeaux presents a confounding and contradictory image by combining the various allegorical figures into a single sculptural group, applying to it the motif of figures supporting a sphere, and largely removing overt markers of racial superiority.
The Second Empire’s political decline may also be understood in symbolically gendered terms. Napoléon III’s turn to colonialism as a comprehensive strategy for recovery and legitimacy responds to the idea that empire was an assertively masculine enterprise, but one whose identity was unstable and insecure, and required constant reassurance. 86 France’s internal disunity disrupted the fragile identity of the French empire as a masculine and productive one. The tumultuous climate that Napoléon III had inherited was a challenge to the masculinity of his regime, as competing political interests and deep divisions along class lines compromised the
85 Marion Romberg, “Continent Allegories in the Baroque Age – A Database,” accessed April 17, 2020, http://www.journal18.org/issue5/continent-allegories-in-the-baroque-age-a-database/. A project carried out at the University of Vienna cataloged the allegory as it appeared on immovable media, such as fresco, in the Southern Holy Roman Empire between the late-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, and provides a comprehensive database of examples of this theme.
86 Philippa Levine, Gender and Empire (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1-11. 36
empire from within. Additionally, his failure to exercise his power and express his legitimacy within Europe presented an external danger that threatened to feminize his regime. As Christina
Carroll showed, this prompted Napoléon III to reframe his empire and pursue colonialism, as his attempts to assert his potency in Europe failed, and as his subjects began to lose their confidence in him and his ability to govern. Even though allegorical figures are almost always female,
Carpeaux’s all-female cast is crucial to this study of the monument that reads it as resonating with
Napoléon III’s colonialist response to this fraught moment. That the continents are female recalls the gendered ways through which scholars have discussed empire and colony: empire as strictly masculine, and colony as feminine, subjugated, and inferior.87 Because imperial discourse relied on the characterization of colonial subjects as being lazy and weak, these peoples and spaces were seen as naturally feminine.88
Carpeaux’s treatment of the allegory of the four continents presents viewers with allegorical figures that can point to specific continents and regions of the world, but that are generalized enough that they recall a number of cultures and groups without referencing any.
The personification of the continents and the association of each figure with a racial type— white/European, indigenous American, East Asian, and Black—allowed the Fontaine to present an image of French hegemonic and colonial supremacy over the entire world, in Europe and beyond.
87 Carroll, 7.
88 Levine, Gender and Empire, 7. 37
The Race of Sculpture and the figure of Europe
The female bodies in the Fontaine form a network of interrelated meanings about race. Of the continents in Carpeaux’s sculptural group, the figure of Europe was the most racially compatible with the monument’s presumed white viewers. The representation of Europe offered viewers a chance to see themselves as participating in this domination of the world that was integral to Napoléon III’s agenda.
This participatory relationship rests upon how Carpeaux chose to depict the figures, as well as on the ways that race was intertwined with sculptural practice. It is possible to think about
Europe’s relatively positive characterization by considering the relationship between race, ethnography, and sculpture.89 As Nelson discusses, the Greco-Roman world has historically been seen as the progenitor of Western civilization, and neoclassical sculpture participated in a return to the aesthetics and materials of the classical world.90 The whiteness of marble, as a signifier of the classical sculptural tradition, became intertwined with European ideological concerns of the nineteenth century as they pertained to race and ethnography. This return to classical sculptural aesthetics and materials was highly selective in its willful ignorance of Greco-Roman polychrome practices. While sculptors in the nineteenth century were aware that their ancient predecessors had applied colored pigments to their works, they consciously chose to circumscribe their use of marble
89 Paul Mantz, “Salon de 1873,” GBA 2, no. 6 (1872), 63; Ernest Chesneau, Le Statuaire Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, sa vie et son oeuvre, 1880, 121-126. While a number of contemporaneous critics like Paul Mantz noted the uncomfortable and precarious way in which some of Carpeaux’s figures support the celestial sphere, they failed to notice how Europe stands out as the only figure presented with a semblance of grace. Others like Ernest Chesneau observed how Carpeaux molded his allegorical figure of Europe in a way that emboldens and imbues her with an air of dignity and noble strength, relative to the other allegorical figures in the group.
90 Nelson, The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 58. 38
to be “faithful to the medium’s whiteness.”91 While the Fontaine was produced in bronze rather than marble, aspects of the figure of Europe clearly denote racial whiteness.
The colonialist dimensions of sculpture and the materiality of Carpeaux’s monument become evident when considering the role of polychromy in nineteenth-century sculpture. One may look to the polychrome sculptures of Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier, whose works like the
1861 La Capresse des Colonies (The Capresse of the Colonies) were seen not in artistic terms, but rather as scientific objects that belonged in natural history and anthropology museums (Fig. 23).92
His ethnographic polychrome works reveal the political dimensions of the medium that confirmed the racial difference and inferiority of non-European cultures, thus supporting France’s colonization efforts. Cordier used contrasting materials and hues to differentiate clothing from skin tone. The dark onyx marble that he used throughout his career can be read as a marker of race, especially given how the whiteness of the marble used in “traditional” sculptures was understood as a signifier of racial whiteness. These images also essentialized race and took a reductive view of black individuals that saw them as ethnographic types. At least in the late nineteenth-century, polychromy was the sculptural interest in ethnographic realism and accuracy taken to its ideological and aesthetic extreme.
91 Nelson, The Color of Stone, 59.
92 Laure de Margerie, Facing the Other: Charles Cordier (1827-1905), Ethnographic Sculptor, trans. Lenora Ammon et al. (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2004), 20. 39
Indeed, while working on the Fontaine, Carpeaux expressed an interest in adding color to his racial types, so as to further distinguish them from one another. His desire to emphasize physical signifiers of race is evident in a letter that he addressed to fellow sculptor Victor Bernard.
In it, he asked,
… how can I be allowed to patinate my group as I dreamed, with the coloring of the races? I entrust you with this mission, that of proving [to Davioud] how much shape and line will be distinguished by the hue. I can see from here the dreadful green wax caking on the shape and the suppleness of the details.93
Davioud ultimately rejected the idea, arguing that distinguishing the figures through color would only take away from the “character of monumental unity which goes so well to compositions placed on public roads.”94 Davioud’s dismissal of polychromy recalls what David Batchelor terms
“chromophobia,” a rejection of blackness itself in favor of the implied whiteness of Carpeaux’s
Europe, which is located in her graceful and quasi-idealized/classicized form. Chromophobia, as
Batchelor states, places an aesthetic and symbolic value of whiteness in art, founded upon the association of the perceived untouched whiteness (or rather, a lack of color) with the western ideal of the classical body.95 In the history of Western art, “white” is understood as the unmarked term in the Foucauldian sense. The natural conclusion of this association of pure, unblemished whiteness with European culture, intellect, and morality inherited from the classical world is that color was everything but: alien, foreign, primitive, vulgar, and therefore dangerous.96 Dismissals of polychromy sculpture, like those of Cordier’s by the public and of Carpeaux’s by Davioud, may
93 Edouard-Désiré Fromentin, “Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Essai biographique, la vie, l’œuvre du statuaire valenciennois d’après sa correspondence,” Valentina 19 (June 1997): 174.
94 Letter from Davioud, 15 September 1874, AMV object 12.
95 David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2001), 17.
96 Batchelor, 22. 40
be understood as thinly-veiled rejections of blackness itself. 97 This discourse of sculpture, materiality, race, and colonialism, suggests how the figure of Europe occupies a symbolically privileged position within the Fontaine’s composition.
The ability for Carpeaux’s mostly, or at least assumed, white viewers to identify with her rests upon the way she is gracefully portrayed, and her implied racial whiteness, which neutralizes the negative connotations of the bronze (i.e., colored) medium. Projecting European (i.e., white) superiority over the rest of the continents and races, this figure stands supreme in the faux- egalitarian program of the Fontaine and allows the work’s viewers to see themselves as benefactors within Napoléon III’s political ambitions. She is nonetheless subjugated by the celestial sphere, alluding to Napoléon III’s turn to science-driven colonialism to reign supreme over his neighbors as the global hegemonic and colonial force.
Blackness and the figure of Africa
Napoléon III’s interventions in North Africa make it strange that Carpeaux’s “African” figure was distinctly not Northern African—Algerian, Egyptian, or otherwise—but a black
African, one recently freed from slavery, as indicated by the broken shackles on her ankle. Why did Carpeaux produce an allegory for Africa in this image if Napoléon III was active in North
Africa and if he abolished slavery in 1848? I argue that the figure of Africa squarely locates the
Fontaine within the history of slavery and that this already-collapsing egalitarian monument reveals itself to be a façade, behind which lies conservative notions of blackness that were used to reinforce the supremacy of racially-pure whiteness.
97 Nelson, The Color of Stone, 62. 41
Examining European conceptions of blackness and the way that the African continent was understood vis-à-vis Europe and the Orient suggests why Carpeaux decided to produce this image of Africa and place her directly across the figure of Europe. Charmaine A. Nelson discusses how, while colonial discourse as Edward Said analyzed it sought to homogenize and distinguish racial types through geography, the vast physical, cultural, linguistic, and geographical differences between Northern and sub-Saharan Africa presented a challenge. 98 The African continent, therefore, disrupted European racial ideology, which sought to reduce and essentialize racial types.
The solution was to theorize blackness as existing at varying degrees of proximity to whiteness so that physical and geographical distance came to stand for moral, intellectual, and racial distance.
The further away from the racial center of Europe a body was, the more divergent it was in its color, physiognomy, and anatomy, with “total blackness” as its most extreme other.99 The implied blackness in the figure of Africa and the placement of this figure opposite Europe insist upon a racial difference that is ideologically and politically motivated. To depict an identifiably Arabic figure to stand for the African continent, and to place this figure anywhere but the furthest point away from the figure of Europe would have been to forgo the opportunity to depict a racial type that was the most distant from that of Europe.
Furthermore, literary historian Christopher L. Miller proposes that the “black African” occupies an ambiguous space vis-à-vis Europe and the “Orient,” as it existed beyond this binary.100
Miller suggests that the almost obsessive European preoccupation with the color black itself reflects and plays a role in this characterization of Africa and its peoples. Drawing from Charles
98 Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art, 120.
99 Nelson, Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art, 164.
100 Christopher L. Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 42
Baudelaire, Miller discusses how blackness is associated with the unknown and the absent, and how “black is to color as zero is to infinity.”101 If black is, as Baudelaire suggests, meaningless and solitary zero, then light and color are positive values.102 As Cohen writes, “the Africans’ color drew much attention because of the shock that Europeans experienced in seeing people of dark skin.”103
Carpeaux’s decision to depict the figure of Africa with broken shackles points to the complex relationship that the Second Empire had to black Africans. The broken shackles may mitigate the negative and inferior connotations of racial blackness by presenting the figure of
Africa as liberated and by alluding to the status of black individuals as productive members of
French society and the French economy post-abolition. 104 However, as these accouterments suggest, blackness in French consciousness was unavoidably entangled with the history of slavery and the debates surrounding its abolition, which were bound up with the myth of the noble savage.
Abolitionists supported their cause by invoking this trope, which characterized indigenous non- white populations as being happy, uncorrupted by modern life, and living in perfect harmony with nature. This myth argued that the presumed simplicity of the African did not warrant abasement, but praise.105 However, they were nonetheless “savage”—Abbé Raynal, for instance, discussed the virtues of the Africans, while cautioning that the defense of their humanity may lead to an
101 Christopher Miller, 80.
102 C. Miller, 88.
103 William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1980): 13.
104 Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Still Thinking About Olympia’s Maid,” Art Bulletin 97, no. 4 (December 2015): 430- 451.
105 William Cohen, 71. 43
exaggeration of their qualities.106 Furthermore, the sciences contributed to the noble savage myth by suggesting that Africans were closer to the primates than Europeans were. The African’s ability to live freely in nature was proof of this association, while the European’s life in civilization was proof that he was further from animality than the African.107
Works like François-August Biard’s 1848 Proclamation of the Abolition of Slavery in the
French Colonies, 27 April 1848 (Fig. 24) reveal that these ideas endured well into Carpeaux’s time. Biard presented a scene in which former slaves on a French colony are celebrating their freedom. What is notable is Biard’s treatment of the former slaves: one of the central figures swings his shackles in celebration as another embraces him, a woman to their left raises her arms in veneration of the French officers who proclaim their freedom, and another to their right collapses onto a European woman in relief and joy. The dynamism of these figures is contrasted by the
French figures who seem to be celebrating in a more poised manner. One officer on the left margin of the canvas extends his arm as if to revel in the role that he and his compatriots have played in abolishing slavery. In Biard’s work, these “noble savages,” brave and courageous for surviving slavery, reveal their animalistic natures as their European counterparts remain graceful and dignified in their expressions. Carpeaux’s Fontaine similarly presents an allegorical figure of
Africa that visually mirrors the figure of Europe—both look upwards and extend their arms as they support the sphere. While Europe is self-assured and well composed, however, Africa gazes upward with an expression that betrays her suffering and is not self-assured or graceful.
106 Cohen., 72.
107 Ibid., 89. It is also worth noting that, as religion is a foundational aspect of the French mission civilisatrice, the myth of the noble savage has a strong relationship with religion and religious missions on the African continent. 44
The endurance of these ideas is also evident in Carpeaux’s 1868 Pourquoi naître esclave?
(Why Born a Slave? or The Black Woman). This bust was created from his study of a live model in preparation for the full-length figure that would become a part of the Fontaine (Fig. 25).
Carpeaux’s bust depicts an ethnographically and racially verisimilar black female through physiognomy and phrenology. The figure turns to her left and looks up as ropes bind her arms and bare chest. The bust exhibited at the Salon includes the inscription “pourquoi naître esclave?” or,
“why born a slave?” at its base.108 The work was reproduced to be sold to private buyers in a number of versions, mediums, and dimensions, including terra cotta, bronze, polychrome plaster, and marble; many editions did not include the original inscription.109 This results in an instability of meaning: the sculpture could either communicate an abolitionist message through the inscription that challenges the institution of slavery or tamp down this message by omitting the inscription. Carpeaux could avoid committing the bust to a singular meaning and appease a wide range of viewers and buyers.
Through this duality of meaning, Carpeaux’s Black Woman may be thought of as simultaneously promoting and disavowing abolition and, by extension, French colonialism. More significantly, the work, being the forerunner of the allegorical figure of Africa, explicitly ties the
Fontaine to a broader discourse of slavery and abolition. Consequently, Carpeaux’s allegorical
108 Although the scholarship seems to disagree on whether the bust exhibited at the Salon was a bronze or marble, Louis Auvray’s 1869 Exposition des beaux-arts : Salon de 1869 clearly indicates that a bronze was displayed. Part of this confusion likely stems from Ernest Chesneau’s Le Statuaire J.-B. Carpeaux : sa vie et son œuvre, written after the death of the artist, in which the author misremembers the bust as being of marble. Being among the major primary biographical sources on Carpeaux, Chesneau’s text has cemented in the tradition of mislabeling the bust exhibited at the Salon as being made in bronze, and has contributed to the confusion over the medium of the work.
109 Catalogue de Sculptures Originales: terres cuites, platres, Bronzes, groups statuettes, bustes, Médallions, Esquisses, 24. This catalog of sculptures by the Atelier J.-B. Carpeaux lists under ‘Busts: portraits, decorative compositions’ an almost half-size reduction of the original Black Woman bust with the inscription included. Reductions without the inscription seem to have also been produced, including a porcelain version produced by the Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres. Furthermore, lifesize casts of the bust with and without the inscription exist in collections around the world. 45
figure overtly expresses the conservative ideologies that, while they may have supported the end to abolition, nonetheless reinforced the supremacy of racial whiteness by defining what it was not: blackness.
Towards a Latin Empire: The Figure of America
Although Carpeaux’s figure of America takes on the image of an indigenous American woman, there is little about her physiognomy that differentiates her from the figure of Europe.110
The figure is identifiable almost entirely through external signifiers—the earrings and headdress— that signal her racial difference and delineate her as distinctly non-white. The image of America as a vaguely indigenous person has a two-fold significance in how the continent and its inhabitants occupied European consciousness, and in the figure’s relationship to Napoléon III’s ambitions in
Central America. Theories of race and may explain the particularities of this figure, and how her appearance and role in the sculptural group resonated with the refashioning of the empire that accompanied Napoléon III’s campaign in Mexico.
The seemingly contradictory egalitarian presentation of the races becomes clear when examining how the French saw themselves vis-à-vis the Mexicans, and how Napoléon III used
France’s Roman heritage as a way to elevate his empire. Like the inhabitants of France and
Mexico, Carpeaux’s figures are, to borrow a phrase, separate but equal. There is something unmistakably regal and noble about Europe that does not seem present in America. While Europe looks upward, her facial features indicating the relative ease with which she supports the sphere,
America exerts herself, as evident in her furrowed eyebrows and contorted body. Should America shed its external signifiers of its racial difference and embrace European governance, as Napoléon
110 Lisa Miller, Carpeaux’s America, 199. 46
III and his predecessors hoped it would, it would be less “savage” and more “civilized.” In presenting Europe and America in these ways, Carpeaux reflected the Second Empire that
Napoléon III re-imagined: one that was powerful in its mastery of the New World, something that his predecessors had failed to do, but one that was also glorious and noble in its loyalty to its
Roman heritage. The politics of race, primitivism, and colonialism that undergirds Napoléon III’s
1861-1867 latinité campaign in Central America manifest in the physiognomic similarities that
Carpeaux’s America shares with Europe.
In one of the few, and certainly among the most comprehensive texts, on the figure of
America, Lisa Salay Miller argues that the figure of America does not stem from the myth of the noble savage. If it had, she reasons, Carpeaux would have expressed this nobility with true ethnic features and worked from live models the way he did with the other allegorical figures. 111
Furthermore, she makes the case that the figure reflects contemporaneous criticisms of Napoléon
III and his failures in America, and functions as a subtle critique of the emperor by the artist. While she makes excellent points, she does not fully consider the intersection of imperial and racial politics. Although Miller’s arguments that Carpeaux was interested in the American continent as it existed contemporaneously are convincing, she dismisses the role of the noble savage in the
Fontaine and overlooks the ways that Napoléon III’s American endeavors used conceptions of race to reframe his empire.
The myth of the noble savage has powerful resonances with Carpeaux’s monument. As scholars have noted, indigenous Americans were often portrayed as naked and happy, content, and uncorrupted from living in a temperate landscape that yielded all of their needs.112 In 1845, Charles
111 Lisa Miller, Carpeaux’s America, 200.
112 L. Miller, 200. 47
Baudelaire, upon seeing a group of the Ojibwa brought to France by George Catlin, lauded the
“free character and the noble expression of these splendid fellows… with their fine attitudes and their ease of movement, these savages make antique sculpture comprehensible.”113 However, the source of their nobility was also the source of their potential downfall—while they were uncorrupted by civilization, they were also removed from the Gospel and were, therefore, prey to the devil.114 As such, they were positioned well to receive “the gift of civilization” from the colonial powers of Europe. This trope and the way that Europeans saw indigenous American populations (and continued to do so well into the late-nineteenth century) have clear parallels to both Carpeaux’s monument and the way that Napoléon III understood his work in Central
America.
Carpeaux did not ignore the extant images of indigenous Americans, as Miller argues, given that the headdress that he produces seems to be drawn from life or other images that appear in European visual culture, such as in Vasco Fernandes’s 1501 Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 26).
Whether they were created by indigenous populations for themselves or were produced for a
European market, headdresses like the one that Carpeaux’s America dons existed in the real world, and continue to do so. His insertion of objects that he either saw directly or through documentation into his work, combined with his demonstrated desire for ethnographic verisimilitude, reveals the intentionality with which his allegorical figure of America was created to resemble that of Europe.
113 Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1846,” in Oeuvres completes des Baudelaire (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue française, 1918): 903-04.
114 Francisco Bethencourt,“Hierarchies of Continents and Peoples,” in Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 108. 48
French Colonial History and Ambition: The Figure of Asia
What is curious about the figure of Asia is how it combined opposing racialized signifiers: the physiognomy of a vaguely East Asian woman and a braided hairstyle worn exclusively by
Qing dynasty Chinese men. This combination generates a rather ambiguous Asian type that transcends ethnic, cultural, and even gender boundaries. For the allegory of Asia, Carpeaux created a figure that had a fluidity of meaning, which resonated with how Napoléon III saw the continent: a region of untapped potential that his predecessors were unable to exploit fully, and whose colonial works he could complete.
Carpeaux was surely aware of the cultural differences in Asian sartorial and tonsorial etiquette, and that these differences could be used to distinguish figures of dissimilar cultural or ethnic groups. Images like Cordier’s 1853 Chinois (Chinese Man) and caricatures of Asian peoples were well-known and widely available (Fig. 27-28). Additionally, the demand in France for
Japanese ukiyo-e prints and fancy-dress books in the 1860s also illustrates the immense and growing popularity of, and familiarity with, Japanese dress.115 Even if Carpeaux was oblivious to the widely-circulating and available images of Asian types in visual culture, we know that he worked from life in preparation for the creation of his full-figure allegory of Asia. Drawing
Chinese people, he produced a number of sculptural sketches and busts, including one titled Le
Chinois (Bust of a Chinese Man) in 1872 (Fig. 29)116 The bust depicts a Chinese man in profile, facing his right as his braided hair drapes over his neck and back. While Laure de Margerie notes
115 Anna Marie Kirk, “Japonisme and Femininity: A Study of Japanese Dress in British and French Art and Society, c. 1860-c. 1899,” Costume: Journal of the Costume Society 42, No. 1 (2008): 111-129.
116 Laure de Margerie, “Fountain of the Observatory,” 161. 49
that this Chinese man would become a woman for the Fontaine, she overlooks the significance of
Carpeaux retaining the subject’s braided hair.
Additionally, having exhibited at the 1867 Universal Exposition, Carpeaux likely would have seen several “Oriental” exhibits, including those organized by China, Japan, and Siam. 1867 was the first time that Japan or Siam had officially taken part in a European exposition and marked a “watershed moment” for European audiences’ engagement with cultural products from East and
Southeast Asia. 117 While artworks and other products had been broadly grouped under the umbrella term of chinoiseries earlier in the decade, 1867, the same year that Carpeaux received the commission for his Fontaine, provided the European consciousness with a means to “consider
Asian art and culture in more culturally specific and politically nuanced ways.”118 Carpeaux was surely at least aware of the fact that the braided hairstyle he depicted his allegory of Asia with did not belong on this figure.
What this reveals is not necessarily a difficulty that Carpeaux faced in creating an allegorical figure to represent what “Asia” and “Asian-ness” looked like in the French consciousness. Rather, considering the increasingly nuanced ways that Europeans were engaging with Asia in visual culture and politics, it suggests how this ambiguity is not only a visual but also a political device. The allegorical figure was mutable and was, therefore, a signifier that could contain any number of references to colonial pursuits and interests: Vietnam and Siam in Southeast
Asia, and China in East Asia, for instance.
117 Meredith Martin, “Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867,” in Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchange between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (1796-1911), ed. Petra ten- Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam (Boston, MA: Brill, 2019), 125.
118 Martin, “Staging China, Japan, and Siam at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867,” 126. 50
As in America, Napoléon III’s colonial engagements in Asia deliberately placed the emperor in direct conversation with his predecessors. The Second Empire’s cross-cultural exchanges with the Siamese is of particular importance, as it positioned Napoléon III firmly as a ruler who continued the work of past monarchs. The history of colonial contact and exchange between the French and Siamese can be traced to the seventeenth century when Louis XIV developed a strong relationship with the then Siamese monarch, Phra Narai, through a series of receptions, as well as diplomatic and commercial exchanges. These monarchs exchanged thousands of gifts and art objects between the 1660s and 1680s for mutual gain.119 For Louis XIV, strong relations with the Siamese court allowed him to gain a foothold in the lucrative Asia trade and compete against the Dutch East India Company, increase missionary activity in Southeast
Asia, and establish an embassy in the Siamese capital of Ayutthaya to bolster French reputation in
Asia and Europe.120
Napoléon III reignited this relationship during his reign as emperor. Notably, in 1861, he held a reception of Siamese ambassadors at the Palace of Fontainebleau, an event commemorated in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s infamous 1865 painting of the event (Fig. 30). As Meredith Martin argues, what Napoléon III sought in commissioning Gérôme to paint the event was a way to channel and surpass past rulers, including his uncle. 121 Indeed, Gérôme’s quotation of David’s Sacre de
Napoléon (Coronation of Napoléon) to present Napoléon III as a reincarnation of his uncle is very much in-line with his political strategy (Fig. 31). Furthermore, the image reveals how the emperor
119 Meredith Martin, “Mirror Reflections: Louis XIV, Phra Narai, and the Material Culture of Kingship,” in Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016), 56-71.
120 Meredith Martin, “Mirror Reflections,” 59.
121 Meredith Martin, “History Repeats itself in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors,” The Art Bulletin 99, No. 1 (April 2017): 108. 51
was also interested in framing his regime as channeling and surpassing that of Louis XIV in his interactions with Siam. 122 Carpeaux’s Asia seems to serve a similar function to Gérôme’s painting—simultaneously a symbol of France’s colonial ambitions in Asia and a reference to the past in a way that framed Napoléon III as the latest ruler of France to work on the project of colonizing Asia. Contact with Siam was crucial for Napoléon III’s Southeast Asian project, where the colonial work that he performed set the foundations for what would become French Indochina.
The ambiguity of form and apparent disregard for ethnographic and anthropological realism that Carpeaux demonstrated in the figure of Asia stems from how Napoléon III pursued political, economic, material, and military domination in not only Southeast Asia but also in East
Asia. What is particularly important for the Fontaine is Napoléon III’s 1857 intervention into the
Second Opium War, during which he sent troops to China to support Britain’s campaign against
Qing-dynasty China. Napoléon III’s forces experienced a rapid victory that strengthened his foothold in Asia and paved the way for the conquest of Cochinchina in 1862.123 Given the significance of the Second Opium War for Napoléon III’s conquest of Asia, it stands to reason that
Carpeaux would include a referent to China in the allegory of Asia in the form of the braided hair.
The difficulty then presents itself: How would Carpeaux distill the French colonial experience in
Asia into a single monument, especially when Napoléon III positioned his conquests through the framework of the past? His answer, as I suggest, was to produce a deliberately ambiguous allegory that could transcend gender, ethnicity, and culture, resulting in a multiplicitous image that could stand for France’s colonial past and its ambitions for the future.
122 Martin, “History Repeats Itself,” 109.
123 Martin, “History Repeats Itself,” 113. 52
Examining Carpeaux’s sculptural group and the individual allegories reveal the deep- seated colonial politics of the Fontaine. The monument, produced in the second phase of Napoléon
III’s empire, responded to the changing conditions of the Second Empire, as it continued to assert itself as the inheritor of Revolutionary ideals, while it became explicitly colonial and expansionary.
Carpeaux’s contradictory faux-egalitarian iconography of the monument resonated perfectly with the Second Empire.
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CONCLUSION A MONUMENT FOR THE FRENCH COLONIAL EMPIRE
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste offers a comprehensive window into Second Empire colonial politics. Its charged racial iconography and site, and its relationship to the broader urban landscape of Haussmannized Paris, place it well within the heart of Napoléon III’s empire, physically and ideologically. Commissioned by
Napoléon III, Haussmann’s renewal of Paris presented a unique opportunity to remake the French capital in the image of the French royal and imperial past, thereby allowing the Second Empire to fashion itself as a powerful and legitimate regime. Additionally, Napoléon III’s celebration of the sciences reveals how he used its relationship with the state to not only position himself as a modern, rational, and effective ruler but one who could also understand and dominate the world à la Said.
Carpeaux revealed himself be a powerful agent of the Second Empire, as the Fontaine celebrates this union in its site and placement, as well as in its racial and ethnographically-realistic iconography.
However, the Fontaine raises questions about the politics of Napoléon III’s administration and about that of his successors. The monument’s straddling of two regimes, the latter that defined itself against the former, is the result of the Third Republic’s adoption of Haussmann’s work and its related projects. While in 1870, Napoléon III dismissed Haussmann in an unsuccessful attempt to appease his critics, the widespread unpopularity of the empire, combined with the stresses of war against Prussia, ensured Napoléon III’s removal from office that very year. The Third Republic nonetheless employed his staff and completed his projects.124 Among these was the Fontaine, for
124 Peter Soppelsa, “How Haussmann’s Hegemony Haunted the Early Third Republic,” in Is Paris Still the Capital of the Nineteenth Century? Essays on Art and Modernity, 1850-1900, ed. Hollis Clayson and André Dombrowski (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), 38. 54
which Carpeaux was instructed to make minor adjustments before its installation in 1874: to decrease the space between the figures of Africa and Asia and remove a support peg placed at the center of the plinth.125
It is curious that the Third Republic adopted the Fontaine, given Carpeaux’s deep connections to the Second Empire. Carpeaux’s relationship with the Second Empire was so strong that he regularly visited the exiled Imperial Family in England, and even traveled to draw Napoléon
III in his coffin upon his death in 1873.126 Carpeaux was so defined by his relationship with the
Second Empire that much of the negative criticism he received when he exhibited his plaster casts of the Fontaine at the Salon of 1872 may be attributed to this political association (Fig. 32).127
More significantly, while it would have made fiscal sense to continue funding the Fontaine, rather than to commission an entirely new project, the fact that Carpeaux was not given more dramatic recommendations to alter his composition suggests that the Third Republic saw in this monument a racial and colonial politics that it could take advantage of. Adopting Haussmann’s project and retrofitting Carpeaux’s sculptural group into its republican iconography, the Third Republic revealed how, like its predecessor, it relied on colonial policy and imagery to assert a concept of
French identity in its pursuit of legitimacy and stability. That the Third Republic would continue the work that the Second Empire had started reveals how it benefitted from the same nationalistic and conservative conception of French identity and exceptionalism.
125 Extract from meeting minutes of the Commission des Beaux-Arts signed by Michaud, secretary of the Commission, January 15, 1872, Item 10, Fontaine du Luxembourg Dossier, Archives Municipales de Valenciennes, Valenciennes, France.
126 Horner, Nadège Horner, “Chronology,” in The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, ed. James David Draper and Eduoard Papet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 16.
127 Laure de Margerie, “Fountain of the Observatory,” 166. 55
The Fontaine suggests that there is greater cultural and ideological continuity between these regimes than is commonly believed. This relationship may be rooted in the similar conditions of their origin. Coming into power amid the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris
Commune, the Third Republic inherited the divided and broken French nation that Napoléon III had left behind. As a consequence, Napoléon III’s successors were forced to address the same political tensions and conflicts that had plagued him upon his ascension. 128 In the wake of widespread trauma, the young government faced issues including war reparations and, more significantly, the corporeal, geographic, and territorial decline of France. This decline was understood through a number of terms: the loss of territory to the German Empire and the resulting loss of a cohesive concept of French identity, and a corporeal loss from death and falling birthrates.
Like Napoléon III, whose questionable legitimacy, rule, and authority were equated to a questionable masculinity, the Third Republic saw the humiliating defeat at the hands of the
Prussians that birthed its regime as a similar crisis in masculine identity.
In this moment, the Third Republic turned to colonial expansion in the manner of Napoléon
III to restore France, thus exposing the close ideological relationship that it shared with its predecessor. 129 The Third Republic continued Napoléon III’s work in Southeast Asia, formally establishing Indochina in 1887. Africa also saw increased colonial activity from the French, especially in Algeria and Tunisia, as well as in West Africa, where French West Africa was created out of Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Niger. It was in these far-off colonies that the pseudo-scientific theories of race, propagated by figures such as Joseph Arthur
128 James R. Lehning, To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 2-6.
129 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 12. 56
de Gobineau and Paul Broca, became widespread.130 Their white-supremacist ideas about racial difference and the dangers of hybridity contributed to fears of national decline and degeneration and offered a powerful framework to view, describe, and dominate colonial subjects.131 While colonial subjects were seen as threatening to the masculine corpus of France, the territories themselves presented a unique opportunity for recovery, where colonial settlers could move to and start families so as to ensure the continuation of the French nation. Much of this was focused in
Africa, with North Africa being seen as a prime colonial space for French settlers to repopulate.
Although there were concerns about whether or not the French would be able to acclimate to colonial geographies and climates across the world successfully, Algeria specifically presented an ideal environment that was close enough to Europe. Unlike in other colonies, the Algerian environment would not threaten the life expectancies or birthrates of French settlers.132 State-led efforts in the colonies to address population decline was also seen in Madagascar in the 1890s, when Joseph Gallieni, the then-Governor-General of the colony, deployed a combination of propaganda, familial reforms, and medicine to promote population growth on the island. 133
If colonial expansion was the policy response to French decline and emasculation, then public sculpture was how the Third Republic mediated this crisis in visual culture. It is in this moment when France was possessed by what Michael Dorsch describes as a “sculpture mania”— a coping mechanism designed to mediate French loss.134 This moment, in which the already-fragile
130 Lehning, To Be a Citizen, 129.
131 Lehning, 130.
132 Margaret Cook Andersen, Regeneration through Empire: French Pronatalists and Colonial Settlement in the Third Republic (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 47.
133 Andersen, 112.
134 Michael Dorsch, French Sculpture Following the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-80 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010). 57
French identity was struggling with itself post-Franco-Prussian War and post-Commune, must be understood as a significant context for the Fontaine. Indeed, although the monument was commissioned and its sketches and models exhibited during Napoléon III’s reign, it was not officially installed, nor did it become a permanent fixture in Haussmannized Paris, until four years after the Third Republic’s establishment.
By focusing specifically on the Second French Empire, this thesis has only begun to unravel the complexities of the Fontaine and its significance for Third Republic politics. What role did Europe, America, Africa, and Asia play as allegorical figures in Carpeaux’s sculptural program, as real geopolitical entities, and as ideological constructions in the French consciousness? And what are the consequences of this cultural and political continuity, as the
Fontaine’s meanings changed over the course of the Third Republic, from its emergence from the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870 to 1940 when it suffered another defeat at the hands of the Third
Reich? There is much work left to be done. That the Third Republic would retrofit the Fontaine into its iconography exposes the monument to a new set of circumstances and contexts within which it must be examined.
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ILLUSTRATIONS Note: Due to copyright restrictions, illustrations are not reproduced in the online version of this thesis. They are available in the hard-copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center, Art Department, Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, D.C.
Figure 1: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste (The Four Parts of the World Supporting the Celestial Sphere), 1867-74. Bronze. Mephokee personal photograph.
Figure 2: Emmanuel Fremiet, Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste,1867-74. Bronze. Mephokee personal photograph.
Figure 3: Carpeaux, Europe, from Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867- 74. Bronze. Mephokee personal photograph.
Figure 4: Carpeaux, America, from Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867- 74. Bronze. Mephokee personal photograph.
Figure 5: Carpeaux, Africa, from Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867- 74. Bronze. Mephokee personal photograph.
Figure 6: Carpeaux, Asia, from Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, 1867- 74. Bronze. Mephokee personal photograph.
Figure 7: Carpeaux, L’Empereur reçoit Abd el-Kader au palais de Saint-Cloud (The Emperor Receiving Abd el-Kader at the Palace of Saint Cloud), 1853. Marble. Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts.
Figure 8: Carpeaux, Le Prince Impérial et son chien Néro (The Imperial Prince and his dog Nero), 1865. Marble. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Figure 9: Carpeaux, Ugolin et ses fils (Ugolino and His Sons), 1865-67. Marble. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Figure 10: Israël Silvestre, Perspective Above Versailles, c. 1690. Drawing. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Figure 11: Pierre Le Pature, General Map of the Palace of Versailles, 1717. Engraving. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Figure 12: Hildegard of Bingen, The Universal Man, from Liber Divinorum Operum, 1165. Painting. Lucca, Biblioteca statale.
Figure 13: Thomas of Cantimpré, from De natura rerum, 1295. Manuscript.
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Figure 14: Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, ca. 1492. Drawing, ink and wash on paper. Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia.
Figure 15: Antoine-Jean Gros, Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa (Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa), 1804. Oil on canvas. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Figure 16: Jean-Baptiste Tuby, Charles Le Brun, Bassin d’Apollon (The Fountain of Apollo), 1668- 71. Bronze.
Figure 17: Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: Title-page with Four Figures which Embody the Four Known Continents, 1606. Illustration. Belin, Staatsbibliothek.
Figure 18: Francesco Bertos, Allegorical Groups Representing the Four Continents: Europe, 1710-25. Bronze. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.
Figure 19: Bertos, Allegorical Groups Representing the Four Continents: America, 1710-25. Bronze. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.
Figure 20: Bertos, Allegorical Groups Representing the Four Continents: Africa, 1710-25. Bronze. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.
Figure 21: Bertos, Allegorical Groups Representing the Four Continents: Asia, 1710-25. Bronze. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum.
Figure 22: Aimé-Jules Dalou, Caryatids: The Four Continents, 1867. Patinated plaster. Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Figure 23: Charles Cordier, La Capresse des Colonies (The Capresse of the Colonies), 1861. Algerian onyx-marble, bronze and gilt bronze, enamel, amethyst; white marble socle. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Figure 24: François-August Biard, Proclamation of the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies, 27 April 1848, 1849. Oil on Canvas. Versailles, Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.
Figure 25: Carpeaux, La Négresse (Pourquoi naître esclave ?), 1868. Terra Cotta. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Figure 26: Vasco Fernandes, Adoration of the Magi, 1501. Oil on panel. Viseu, Museu de Grão Vasco.
Figure 27: Cordier, Chinois (Chinese Man), 1853. Gilded and enameled bronze. Hamilton, Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Figure 28: Jean-Jacques Grandville, Commerce Anglais, from La Caricature, 1840.
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Figure 29: Carpeaux, Le Chinois (Bust of a Chinese Man), 1872. Patinated plaster. Paris, Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.
Figure 30: Jean-Léon Gérôme, Réception des ambassadeurs siamois par Napoléon III dans le château de Fontainebleau, le 27 juin 1861 (Reception of the Siamese Ambassadors at the Château of Fontainebleau, June 27, 1861), 1865. Oil on canvas. Versailles, Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.
Figure 31: Jacques-Louis David, Le Sacre de Napoléon (Coronation of Napoléon), 1807. Oil on canvas. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Figure 32: Carpeaux, Varnished plaster model for Les Quatre parties du monde soutenant la sphère céleste, exhibited 1872. Patinated plaster. Paris, Musée d’Orsay.
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