THE MUSEUM'S EXHIBIT ON THE REVOLUTION COVERS A FULL FLOOR, BUT VIOLENCE AND SANS-CULOTTES* ALMOST VANISH
*Craftsmen who wore trousers adapted to physical work, in contrast with the breeches and silk stockings of the privileged. They and shop owners became the Revolution's striking force.
Taking the Bastille is impossible to avoid...
"The entire world knew, hated the Bastille. Bastille, tyranny, were synonyms in all languages. At the news of its ruin all nations believed themselves delivered.
In Russia, in that empire of mystery and silence, that monstrous Bastille between Europe and Asia, the news had barely arrived before men of all nations shouted, cried in the squares, threw themselves in each others' arms while stating the news: 'How not cry from joy? The Bastille is taken !'"
-- Histoire de la Révolution française by Jules Michelet, 1847 (my translation)
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La Prise de la Bastille by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand, vers 1789 / zoom |
La Prise de la Bastille, same painter / zoom
...the museum shows a peaceful model, keys and a painting about its demolition instead.
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The royals too cannot be avoided, but their imprisonment replaces their deaths:
An unreadable proclamation and garter overwhelm the evocative portrait of Marie-Antoinette in prison.
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A single painting shows the Terror, guillotine and crowd:
An execution on place de la Concorde, anonymous
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Absent: The attack on Versailles that forced the king's transfer to Paris, the royal family's desastrous flight to the border and the seizure of the Tuileries palace.
That blood-soaked event brought the end of the thousand-year monarchy. The museum owns at least one work about it: Please click and scroll down. Not showing it is astonishing.
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The sans-culottes defeated the nobility and their egalitarianism sets the French Revolution apart from other bourgeois revolutions.
-- Albert Soboul, La Révolution française, 1965
The museum's presentation:
- A singer posed as a well-dressed sans-culotte. The museum owns the well-known work, but though I searched for it I did not find it on my first five visits.
Portrait du chanteur Simon Chenard en costume de sans-culotte by Louis-Léopold Boilly, 1792 / zoom
- On a sixth visit it finally appeared in a dark corner, in an arid presentation that was hard to see:
- Other images emerge only at the back of the last room, behind proclamations, portraits of middle-class leaders...
- ...and a game for kids.
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The night before taking the Bastille:
Strong men, patient men, so pacific until then, who on a single day struck a grand blow for Providence, the sight of your families, without resources except for you, did not soften your heart. On the contrary, on seeing for the last time your sleeping children, those children whose destinies the new day would change, your uplifted thought embraced the free generations that would arise from their cradles, and felt in that dawn the combat of the future."
-- Jules Michelet (my translation)
A message opposite to the museum's.
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