1. Jacques- Louis David, drawing: The
Tennis Court Oath
•A celebration of June 1789 Events
•7 X 10 metre painting – but was never finished
Schama: on its location in the Louvre it was a celebration of
‘ the reigning fiction of revolutionary patriotic unity’.
6. A way to communicate the significance of the event
represented was to introduce symbols and allegories.
This could be done either discreetly without disturbing the
generally realistic effect — for example, by placing a symbol on
a flag — or overtly, by employing unrealistic elements such as
inscriptions in unlikely places or allegorical personifications in
the air.
With regard to this last option, one must remember that
during the Revolution in France (and that goes for any other
time and place in history) there was a shared visual and
political culture among contemporaries.
7.
8. Schama’s (1989) comments:
•‘light played on the head of Sylvain Bailly commanding the oath.’
•‘Sieyes seen at the desk as the ideologist of the national sovereignty’
•‘Robespierre… his arms crossed on his chest in the body language of Rousseauean
sincerity and virtue.’
•‘the People, endlessly apostrophized* by the politicians, make their appearance as
audience, pupils and ideal citizens: patriotic in their masculinity but never threatening in
their unruliness’.*Addressing an absent person as if he were present!
•‘the san-culotte with the Phrygian hat is modelled like an antique statue and posed like
Michelangelo fresco.’
•‘The group at top right… incorporates the inevitable sentimental alliance between the
venerable and the juvenile: past suffering and future hope.’
•‘The cliches become forgivable as David throws into the composition the immense
force of the revolutionary tempest, given literal visualisation through the blown drapery.
Old-regime conventions and traditional sovereignty are turned inside out like the
umbrella seen at top left… This great political gale surges into the empty space of the
court to meet the straining, ecstatic collective gesture of the deputies, at the lit centre of
the orthogonal cross.’
•‘The figures, said one critic, “breathe with the love of the patrie, of virtue and liberty”.’
10. Poets of Romantic weather-forecasting like Andre Chenier and
William Wordsworth, who felt its drama, continued to describe
the Revolution as a great cyclonic disturbance. But
increasingly it was no longer the storm that invigorates and
cleanses; rather, a dark and potent elemental rage, moving
forward in indiscriminate destruction. Its breath was no longer
sweet but foul. It was the wind of war.
Schama Citizens (A.Knopf New York, USA 1989)
16. The fall of the Bastille probably created one of the greatest of
symbols of the initial stage of the Revolution. After all, this
medieval fortress had come to represent the ancien regime for
most Parisian men and women. After the attack on the Bastille
had concluded, the people leveled the fortress, taking home
with them pieces of masonry as souvenirs (not unlike what
happened in Berlin in November 1989). The image below
depicts a model of the Bastille made from from one piece of
masonry.
17. This hand–colored engraving equates the taking of the Bastille with the rise of the Third Estate against the
clergy and nobility. A commoner in a black hat sporting a tricolor cockade plays the bagpipe triumphantly
over the fallen lion of the absolutist monarchy. To the side, a revolutionary soldier raises his sword to menace
a priest.
