The End of the Old Regime
The high culture of nineteenth-century Europe was shaped by a tension between two opposing concepts of art: between art as consumerism and art as redemption. What should take priority: making money or saving mankind? This was not a new dilemma, but it was given added urgency around 1800 by the cumulative effect of long-term social and intellectual changes. The rise in population, the growth in the size and number of towns, expanding literacy, and improved physical communications had combined to create a market for culture which could already be dubbed ‘popular’ and was well on the way to becoming ‘mass’. The culture of a century earlier had been essentially representational, with the primary function of re-presenting (in the sense of ‘making present’ or giving visual or aural expression to) the power and the glory of the royal, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical patron. The palace of Versailles, where all the various arts combined to sing the praises of Louis XIV, was the most complete example. This peacock world of gorgeous display by the favoured few before a passive audience was challenged in the course of the eighteenth century by quite a different culture: the culture of the public sphere. In the place of flamboyance it brought sobriety, in the place of the senses it brought the intellect, in the place of the image it brought the concept, in the place of hierarchy it brought ‘a republic of letters’ open to talent. Above all, it substituted criticism among equals for passive acceptance by the subordinate spectator.
For the creative artist, this development of a public seemed to offer the chance of emancipation. In the place of the over-mighty individual patron —famously defined by Samuel Johnson (1709-84) as someone who watches with indifference a man struggling for his life in the water, only to encumber him with assistance when he reaches shore—came the anonymous public, to whom the German playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) dedicated himself in 1784: ‘I write as a citizen of the world who serves no prince. . . From now on all my ties are dissolved. The public is now everything to me—my preoccupation, my sovereign and my friend.’ Unfortunately, Schiller then found that his high opinion of the public was not reciprocated and was obliged to seek employment as a professor of history (a menial position if ever there were one) from the duke of Weimar. The public was not yet large enough or rich enough to sustain an independent artist—but it was growing all the time.
The transformation of the people from passive recipients into active participants was dramatized by the rapid development of a democratic political culture in France after 1789. The elaborate revolutionary festivals turned spectators into actors, with mass processions, mass demonstrations, mass bands, and mass singing. At the great Festival of the Supreme Being in Paris on 8 June 1794, delegations from each of the city’s forty-eight sections paraded from the Tuileries to the Champs-de-Mars, where a great artificial ‘mountain’ had been constructed, decorated with such ‘accidents of nature’ as rocky outcrops, grottoes, and undergrowth, and crowned by a symbolic tree of liberty. To the accompaniment of an immense band of brass and woodwind (stringed instruments were of little use in the open air), revolutionary hymns were sung, interposed between two speeches by Robespierre. That the latter’s windy rhetoric was inaudible to the great majority present, in the absence of electronic amplification, did not matter one jot: this was not a culture based on the word; rather it relied on open-air spectacle, visual symbol, the singing of simple verses to simple music, and the special excitement which comes from being part of a crowd.
In the excited atmosphere of Revolutionary France, the ephemeral nature of the poetry, painting, or music produced for such occasions could be overlooked. Three of the country’s leading artists collaborated on the Festival of the Supreme Being: the painter Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), who supervised the whole affair and was indeed the great ‘pageant-master’ of the Republic, the composer Francois Joseph Gossec (1734-1829), and the poet Marie-Joseph de Chenier (1764- 1811). Yet their work for the revolutionary masses survives only as historical curios. The exception which proves the rule is David’s deeply felt Homage to Marat, which depicts the assassinated radical bleeding to death in his bath, a personal statement of outrage and grief. It may well be the case that in public life ‘the festivals inaugurated a new era because they made sacred the values of a modern, secular, liberal world’, as Lynn Hunt has suggested, but for the creative artists of Europe the culture of the French Revolution proved to be a blind alley.
World History
