LARGE, COLORFUL PAINTINGS INTRODUCE ITS TRIUMPH
Combattants are well-dressed young men and modish girls whose coiffures require a maid.*
*For the real fighters, please click.
- The panel at the entry shows ordinary people in the background, but fashionable women implore a soldier in the foreground:
- In the outsize painting with which the exhibit begins, the important figures are Swiss guards or middle class. The two workers (in the white shirts) are secondary and we do not see their faces:
Taking the Louvre, July 29, 1830, Massacre of the Swiss Guards by Louis Bezard, 1832 / zoom
- The museum also shows drawings of dainty young women, though all they did was watch royal troops from their salon windows.*
Left: stylish girls fight. Right: spotless white trousers, curled hair, a corset that nips the waist, immense sleeves and in the background, frock coats and top hats.
Throwing things out of windows implies a popular rising but the museum chooses a work where that is only inferred, leaving in its reserve one that is much more explicit:
Combat on rue Saint-Antoine, anonymous, 1830 / zoom
Rue Saint-Antoine was an artisans' neighborhood, famously at the heart of revolts.
Though there too fighters' dress shows them as middle class:
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About 200 students and a few
republican journalists and intellectuals
were the only people of relative privilege
to join the street-fighting.
As for the revolts
that six months later became endemic,
the museum shows nothing.
* * *
Next,
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