THE VIOLENT IMAGERY OF VICTORS ON HORSEBACK

ART THAT GLORIFIES WAR BEGAN WITH STATUES OF KINGS 

On the arch that dominated the Saint-Denis gate an exhausted lion evokes the defeat of the Habsbourg monarchy* and shows Louis XIV slaying the defeated: 

* The lion appears on its coat of arms.

The sculpture commemorates the Crossing of the Rhine by the French army in 1674, the prelude to two decades of massacres by the French armies in western Germany.  

 A century and a half later, the same idea:

Napoleon at Eylau by Jean Gros, 1807-1808, Louvre / zoom

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When Prussia crushed France (in 1871), the French were stunned by the hatred of the German Confederation's soldiers.

It came from the memory of those massacres (please scroll down), and the arrogance that those works express.

The Prussian emperor demanded an armistice that was deliberately humiliating for the French, and that it be signed under a triumphalist painting of Louis XIV in Versailles's Hall of Mirrors: 

  The Proclamation of the German Empire by Anton von Werner, 1885 / zoom

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Facing the Louvre is a statue de Jeanne d'Arc, the first to be made after that defeat: la revanche ("revenge") it represented was one of the reasons for World War I. 

*Le nouveau état allemand avait annexé l'Alsace et une partie de la Lorraine après la défaite des Français  mentionne ci-dessus. Jeanne d'Arc était le symbole de la revanche à venir, puisqu'elle avait chassé les Anglais du pays.

Monument to Joan of Arc by  Emmanuel Frémiet, place des Pyramides

Defeat 1870, statue 1874

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The Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies of World War I, looks over the splendid perspective that leads to the Eiffel Tower.

It is changes the subject from the carnage of that war, which provoked the 20th centuries' calamities :

Maréchal Foch by Raymond Martin and Robert Wlérick / Internet, photographer not named 

The arrow leads to the Eiffel Tower.

But de Gaulle is always on foot. 

In front of the Grand Palais

Because his generation of officers no longer rode horses? Because of his height, long legs and long paces? Because the film of his march down the Champs-Elysées at the Liberation is so famous? Or to set him apart? 

Whatever the reason, 

de Gaulle is always shown striding,

an image that coincides with peace in Europe.

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Next,

Heroes on white horses