The "Citoyenne" Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture during the French Revolution Author(s): Amy Freund Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 93, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 325-344 Published by: CAA Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23046580 Accessed: 20-06-2019 15:18 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms CAA is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Thu, 20 Jun 2019 15:18:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Citoyenne Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture during the French Revolution Amy Freund Revolutionary Paris was awash in portraits. Portraits domi critical gaze of its fellow citizens. The continual communica nated the Salon, filled the print shops, decorated political tion of Republican sentiments, a goal difficult to realize in clubs, and were paraded through the streets in festivals and the flesh, could be attained by a portrait, the permanent funerals. Commissioners eager to redefine themselves in Rev image of the soul or, at least, of the body. olutionary terms flocked to portraitists' studios at a time Revolutionary portraits reveal the ways in which French when patronage for other genres of art production was dry citizens reformulated the basic elements of selfhood at a ing up. The statistics from the official Salon exhibitions testify moment when traditional political and social hierarchies to the growing visibility of portraiture. Between 1789 and were being dismantled. In the wake of the collapse of the 1791, the number of portraits exhibited at the Salon more ancien regime and of the Royal Academy of Painting and than doubled, and the totals continued to rise steadily over Sculpture and its aesthetic strictures, sitters and artists the Revolutionary period.1 The complaint of a critic at the adapted the old conventions of portraiture to new social 1796 Salon confirms the increasing public presence of the realities. Some hierarchies, nonetheless, remained largely genre and snidely lays the blame for the epidemic of portraits unchallenged by the successive Revolutionary governments. at the feet of the Revolution: "Portraits, portraits, and more Citizenship was a male prerogative. Women had neither vot portraits. Since we have all become brothers, the Salon has ing rights nor legal access to military or civil posts. But been made into a gallery of family portraits."2 Indeed, liberty, portraiture was not a male prerogative. Its centrality to Rev equality, and fraternity seem to have served as tonics for the olutionary visual culture made it a particularly effective portrait market. The dismantlement of the nobility and the means by which women could claim political agency. The emigration of many members of the pre-Revolutionary elite visual vocabulary for making that claim, however, was limited. may have affected demand for portraiture at the highest end Revolutionary allegories employed female faces and bodies to of the price scale (and this is far from certain), but the visualize liberty, reason, nature, or the Republic, but actual popularity of portraiture touched all socioeconomic levels. women were discouraged from representing themselves as The cheapest available portraits, such as the silhouettes and political actors. The efforts of those women who seized on the mechanically produced physionotraces made by artists work Revolution's promise of universal liberty and equality, such as ing on the streets of Paris, could be purchased for as little as the participants in the women's political clubs that were three livres, at a moment when a ticket for the standing founded after 1789 or activists like Olympe de Gouges, were places at the Opera cost a little more than two livres.3 Por quickly suppressed. The only officially acceptable model for traits were affordable and much in demand by the newly Revolutionary femininity, promoted in speeches, in print, constituted French people. and in visual representation, was that of the Republican wife Portraiture was central to post-1789 visual culture because and mother, inspiring patriotism in her husband and raising it proposed solutions to the fundamental challenge of the citizens for the nation. Revolution: how to make subjects into citizens. Revolutionary A few women succeeded in carving out political identities legislators confronted the problem of regenerating the na for themselves over the course of the Revolution. Not many tion from the top down, legislating sweeping changes in the of them commissioned portraits. The case of Theresia Cabar nation's political, social, and cultural structures. The citizens rus, better known as Mme Tallien, is exceptional. Socially of the new France used portraits to effect regeneration from prominent, politically active, and profoundly convinced of the bottom up. Both portraiture and Revolutionary political her ability to shape her own destiny, Cabarrus posed for a morality were predicated on the assumption that the face and portrait that not only proposed a novel form of female sub body communicated essential truths about the sitter to the jectivity but also inserted its sitter into the national drama of viewer. Transparency between citizens was the watchword of the Terror (Fig. 1). Cabarrus's portrait, painted byJean-Louis the new regime. Now that political sovereignty rested with the Laneuville and exhibited at the Salon of 1796, depicts, as the people, it was particularly important that the people be vir title in the Salon catalog informs us, "The Citizen [Citoyenne] tuous, and that their shared virtue be clearly manifested to Tallien in a prison cell at La Force, holding her hair which each other and in the governance of the state.4 Maximilien has just been cut."6 The portrait represents Cabarrus's im Robespierre expressed this desire for constant and unim prisonment two years earlier by the radical Jacobin govern peded communion between the individual and the polity in ment. Cabarrus's prison correspondence with her then lover, 1794 when, speaking on the floor of the legislature, he Jean-Lambert Tallien, reportedly prompted Tallien to stage a looked forward to a new political order, "where all souls are coup d'etat against Robespierre, thus bringing the Terror to magnified by the continual communication of Republican an end and liberating Cabarrus. In this complex life-size sentiments and by the need to merit the esteem of a great composition, Cabarrus and her portraitist manipulated the people. ,"5 Robespierre posits a self that is always demon conventions of female portraiture in order to produce a self strating its republicanism and is constantly mindful of the that was both reassuringly feminine and capable of interven This content downloaded from 202.41.10.5 on Thu, 20 Jun 2019 15:18:16 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 326 art bulletin September 2011 volume xciii number 3 4$ 1 Jean-Louis Laneuville, The Citoyenne Tallien in the Prison of La Force, Holding Her Hair Which Has Just Been Cut, exhibited at the Salon of 1796, oil on canvas, 63% X 50% in. (162 X 129 cm). Collection of the princes of Chimay (artwork in the public domain) ing in the course of national history—a citoymne in the full portrait of Cabarrus thus did political as well as biographical sense of the term. That her attempt to create a feminine and aesthetic work. version of political agency through portraiture was by and The ambitious format of Cabarrus's portrait, moreover, large a failure provides us with an insight into the unfulfilled points to the ways in which portraiture was becoming the promises of Revolutionary citizenship. most important artistic means of investigating pressing phil The case of Cabarrus's portrait also demonstrates the value osophical and moral questions. Portraiture at this time took of understanding portraiture as a collaborative process. A on many of the responsibilities of history painting, making portrait is the product of the ambitions of both the sitter and moral exemplarity and historical agency something that or the artist. Recent work on portraiture in the eighteenth and dinary people could claim for themselves. The Revolution nineteenth centuries has privileged the artist's claims over marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness the sitter's, an approach that obscures the complex power of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from the formula dynamics of the portrait process as well the unique nature of tion of historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary portraiture's intervention in cultural and social debates.7 individuals—both men and (uneasily, as the case of Cabar Rethinking portraiture as a collaboration yields a more vivid, rus's portrait shows) women. This shift had major conse and more historically responsible, understanding of what is at quences for the course of art production in the modern era: stake—personally, aesthetically, and culturally—for artists, the undermining of academic genre hierarchies, the fore sitters, and viewers. This approach to portraiture is particu grounding of the individual subject as the focus of ambitious larly crucial for our understanding of the Revolutionary mo painting, and, eventually, the rise of a modernist painting ment. As both historians and art historians have noted, the concerned with the contemporary and the contingent. Revolution provoked a wave of what historian Jan Goldstein Cabarrus's portrait not only participated in these cultural refers to as "self-talk": intense debate over the constituent changes but also made an argument for the centrality of elements of individual identity.8 Paintings like Laneuville's women to the Revolutionary polity.