Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France

Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial FranceAuthor(s): William CohenSource: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 491-513Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/178768 .

Accessed: 08/05/2014 16:37

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Cambridge University Press and Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History are collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Studies in Society and History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 16:37:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=cup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/178768?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France WILLIAM COHEN

Indiana University

Maurice Agulhon, in his classic French historical study, revealed how the changing political fortunes of Republicanism were reflected in the many metamorphoses that statues of the Republic had undergone in the century after the French Revolution.1 This study and a number of important works by North Americans, like those of James Leith and Lynn Hunt, are also important in making us understand French political iconography.2

The rhetoric of the political classes in nineteenth-century France revealed their changing ideologies and commitments that were not only expressed in word. There was also a desire to put a stronger imprint, to perpetuate their values in the space that they dominated. In big and small cities, elites that controlled local city councils carried on programs of erecting statues to local and national figures, historical and contemporary. The nineteenth century was to see an era that Agulhon has called one of statumania.

Erecting statues was a pedagogic device used by the dominant political ideologies to win over the inhabitants, helping to create an imagined community of Frenchmen, whether Royalist or Republican. Benedict Anderson has reminded us that the only "real" community is the village-the rest is imagined, an artifact. The notion that a sailor from Quimper and a winegrower from Bergerac have something in common is due to the ability to create an imagined community. This was done through the written word communicated to a larger audience through the newspaper and the public school, through military service, through the development of a national market, and also through statuary.3 In an age that still experienced large amounts of illiteracy,

1 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle-Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880, Janet Lloyd, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

2 James A. Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda in France, 1750-1799-A Study in the History of Ideas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); idem, Media and Revolution- Moulding a New Citizenry in France During the Terror (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corpo- ration, 1968); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; idem, "Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution," Representations, 2 (Spring 1983), 95-117.

3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities-Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Na- tionalism (London: Verso, 1983); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford, CA: Stan- ford University Press, 1976).

0010-4175/89/3554-2383 $5.00 ? 1989 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

491



492 WILLIAM COHEN

statues might prove more effective than political pamphlets in winning the hearts and minds of the population. Even in a literate society, we find that people are essentially visually oriented. This was well understood in the eighteenth century, and a whole literature on the rationale of erecting public statuary existed. The philosophes (eighteenth-century French thinkers) gave some thought to the power of symbols. Denis Diderot asserted that graphic representations were more powerful than the word:

The sort of exhortation which appeals to the heart by means of the senses, aside from permanence, is more within reach of the common man. The People make better use of their sight than of their understanding. Images preach without ceasing, and do so without wounding our vanity.4

The Revolutionary era, so eager to establish legitimacy for the new regime, understood the need to manipulate the symbols of power. Abbe Henri Gre- goire, both a philosopher of sorts and a Revolutionary, pointed out the need for the Old Regime to be represented by powerful symbols. His understanding of the role of symbols has not been improved upon in the last two centuries:

The legislator who ignores the importance of signs will fail at his mission; he should not let escape any occasion for grabbing hold of the senses, for awakening republican ideas. Soon the soul is penetrated by the objects reproduced constantly in front of its eyes: and this combination, this collection of principles, of facts, of emblems which retraces without cease for the citizen his rights and his duties, this collection forms in a manner of speaking, the republican mold which gives him a national character and the demeanor of a free man. .. .5

The connection between power and its symbols was manifest in the attack by the Revolutionary Assembly on various emblems of royal authority. Even prior to the beheading of the king, royalty was physically assaulted. In August 1792 the Revolutionary Assembly decreed the destruction of monuments glorifying the royal house, "erected to pride, superstition and tyranny."6 Upon the return of monarchy to France after 1814, many of the monuments that had been previously destroyed or removed were rebuilt, restoring not only the monarchy, but its symbols. The vulnerability of such memorials to the vagaries of politics was dramatically demonstrated in the fate of the immense eighteen-foot high, 12.5-ton bronze statue that the Bordeaux City Council erected to Louis XVI in 1882. The statue was finished in the atelier of a leading sculptor, Nicolas-Bernard Raggi, in June 1830, at a most awkward

4 M. A. Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann, trans. (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977), 124-5; Diderot (quoted in Leith, Media, 43).

5 Gr6goire (quoted in Hunt, "Hercules," 97). 6 Decree of 11 August 1792, cited in Edouard Pommier. "Naissance des musees de

province," in La Nation, II, pt. 2 of Les lieux de memoire, Pierre Nora, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 468; on the general themes of iconoclasm during the Revolution, see Stanley J. Idzerda, "Iconoclasm during the French Revolution," American Historical Review, 60 (October 1954), 13-26.



STATUES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE 493

moment. Installing the statue "was no longer in harmony with the current situation," wrote the prefect in 1833.7 Fearing ultra-Royalist demonstrations, the July Monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Empire prevented the statue from being sent to Bordeaux. It didn't arrive until 1869, and then it was stored for nine years in a crate in the garden of the city hall. In 1877 it was put in the Bordeaux City Museum where it remained until it was melted down by the Germans in World War II.8

The two Napoleons were no safer from posterity than the Bourbons. Napoleonic statues were torn down by impassioned mobs at the news of the

collapse of the imperial regimes. Angry Marseille mobs tore down a statue in 1814 that they believed to be that of the emperor, and they covered all the Napoleonic insignia with manure. In Lyon, a statue erected to Louis Napo- leon with much pomp during the Second Empire was torn down in 1870 at the news of defeat and the resignation of the imperial house and was made into cannon ball. The founder of the Second Empire was given his statue in Bordeaux in 1857 with the inscription "l'empire c'est la paix," but in 1870 it was again hacked to pieces and thrown into the Garonne. As Emile Durkheim was to write early in the next century, symbols can be so powerful that they succeed in concentrating upon themselves the fervor that belongs only to the ultimate reality they represent.9

Statues were such powerful symbols that their destruction was nearly im- perative as a means of affirming allegiance to the new regime. The Municipal Council of Marseille decreed in 1831 the immediate "eradication of fleurs de lys and other emblems of the previous government."1' Having demolished the signs of the old, newly established regimes wished to put their imprint upon the urban landscape, thus asserting their arrival to power. The constant change in statuary resulting from political instability was already so apparent in 1814 that an English visitor to Paris suggested that it might be more practical and less expensive to leave "niches . . . in public monuments in which different heads and names might be slid as occasion requires .. " instead of the constant cavalcade of different statues and new inscriptions on their pedestals. 1

Tearing down and erecting monuments were ways of taking vengeance on

7 Prefect Pressac, quoted in: Gabriel Loirette, "Histoire d'une statue a Louis XVI de Raggi," Revue historique de Bordeaux, 36 (1943), 70.

8 Ibid., 52-82. 9 Augustin Fabre, Histoire de Marseille, II (Marseille: Marius Olive, 1829), 640-1, 663;

Francois Dutacq," Une statue lyonnaise de Napoleon Ier," Revue des etudes napoleoniennes, 15 (1926), 31-51; Emile Durkheim, Lesformes elementaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912), 219-21.

10 Seance (meeting), 22 February 1831, Marseille, Deliberations du conseil municipal, annee 1830-1831 (Marseille: Gravier et fils, 1876), 24.

11 John Scott, A Visit to Paris in 1814 (London: Longman, 1815), 63.



494 WILLIAM COHEN

the past and shaping a new understanding of it. In revolutionary times the imprint of royalism had to be obliterated. When the monarchy returned to power, the emphasis was on destroying the symbols of the Revolution and celebrating its victims. Old monuments were replaced by new ones. As Foucault put it in a stark but nevertheless compelling way:

Memory is actually a very important factor in struggle. ... If one controls memory, one controls their dynamism. ... It is vital to have possession of this memory, to control it, administer it, tell it what it must contain.12

Beginning in the 1870s, the erection of statues to Marianne (the symbol of the Republic) became a test of the loyalty of a locale to the new regime. The mayor of Lyon declared the need to build a huge statue to the Republic by the railroad station, so that travelers disembarking would immediately be cogni- sant of the city's "Republican faith." (It was while inaugurating this statue in 1894 that President Carnot was assassinated by an Italian anarchist.) In addition to the statues of Marianne that denoted allegiance to the Republic, Agulhon has reminded us that the varying forms used to depict Marianne were further indications of the type of Republic that its sponsors supported.'3 If Republican iconography had its roots in the Revolution, the custom of celebrating figures representing the regime was a certainly older one going back to l'ancien regime and continued in all the succeeding regimes, as the selected examples mentioned here reveal.

The statumania that started in 1870 after the establishment of the Republic denoted a more democratic era. The Republican era shunned statuary of kings and saints. Allegorical themes also declined, to be replaced by statuary of local and national figures that could speak to the concerns of a newly enfran- chised citizenry. Contemporaries were well aware of the explosion in the number of statues that were being established. A Lyonnais commentator wrote in 1881:

Never has France been more proud of its heroes, its scientists, its artists, and from all sides one sees statues and monuments being erected . . . consecrated to the illustrious memory and to render immortal the men [sic] worthy [of honor] ... 14

The statuary of the nineteenth century was often very concrete. While there were the statues of the Republic, of the nation (usually a woman in varied garb) the number of statues of individuals dressed in their suits and usually bereft of any complex iconography was impressive. A statue of Louis Pasteur might include a depiction of the future generations he had saved showing him

12 Foucault, quoted in Keith Michael Baker, "Memory and Practice: Politics and the Repre- sentation of the Past in 18th Century France," Representations, 11 (Summer 1985), 134.

13 Temps (newspaper), October 10, 1888; Agulhon, Marianne, passim. 14 Aim6 Vingtrinier, "Une statue a Pierre Dupont," Lyon Revue, 2 (1881), 675.




a debt of gratitude, war memorials to the 1870 war might have angels or symbols of a grieving motherland, but on the whole statuary was not rich in iconographic imagery. This was in harmony with the simple democratic goals of having the statues appeal to the electorate. Of course, it could become somewhat tiresome. By the turn of the century a major provincial newspaper was to complain, "A statue is not appropriate for everyone . . . we don't desire to contemplate the frock coat, the pants, the shoes [of everyone] on a pedestal in a public square."15

Statues were an immediate and apparently unmediated way of communicating political values to a people who might be wavering in political loyalties. If the original sense of community might well be the village, the intrusion of symbols that linked locale with large and historically significant events of France helped to create an imagined community. In part, civic symbolism made it possible for people to imagine common membership in this community.

The placing of statues in a village, town, or city indicated an attempt to establish hegemony for the ideas represented by the monument. The placement of monuments was very important. The erection of the statue to the Republic in Lyon next to the railroad station was significant. Given the central role the railroad occupied for Lyon and its region (receiving and sending forth large numbers of travelers), the location was ideal. The railroad was also a clear symbol of progress and change, as was the Republic. The location of a monument could decide its impact on the public. A major crossing of thor- oughfares, a central square not only was chosen to indicate the triumph of Republicanism, but also to ensure it by offering it a maximum of exposure to the public.

Local governments did not see just national figures as worthy of statuary but also viewed local ones as worthy of celebration. In Lyon a prominent journalist urged the city fathers in 1840 to forego building statues for even good kings or emperors and instead to give preference to celebrating local citizens: "There will thus be something akin to family sentiment making us love the noble image of a noble citizen whose career was virtuous and emi- nently useful." The erection in 1840 of a statue to Joseph Jacquard, a simple Lyonnais artisan who had invented a new weaving machine, seemed an appropriate celebration of a more democratic temperament that had made itself felt in this city of artisans and early Republican sentiment.'6

Statuary became a familiar form of expression because it was strongly engaged in fostering local patriotism and celebrating the glories of the individual town. Filling a city with monuments was a palpable way of asserting its history and past greatness. A local historian of Lyon had declared in 1840 that

15 Depeche de Toulouse (newspaper), 7 November 1903. 16 F. Z. Collombet, "Des Statues en general," Revue du Lyonnais, 12 (1840), 235.



496 WILLIAM COHEN

"The history of a city is nearly entirely revealed in its monuments." Nine years earlier a foundation in Lyon had begun to finance the carving of famous Lyonnais "who by their talent and work illustrate their patrie." The general council of the Bouches-du-Rhone decided to erect a monument in Marseille for the artist Pierre Puget- "the Michaelangelo of France"--to affirm "the artistic honor of our city and whole Provence." The Lyon statue for the scientist Andre-Marie Ampere was intended to demonstrate that Lyon was in the leading rank "in intelligence and work" and the extent to which it con- tributed to "the national glory." When the small town of D61e in the Jura erected a statue to Louis Pasteur, it was to remind the world "of the historic fact that Dole is the birthplace of the illustrious scientist. . . "17

Civic pride and the competition of one city against the other fueled statumania. Since Rouen had honored its native son, Pierre Corneille, with a statue, a fitting memorial would also have to be found for Bordeaux's literary giant, Michel Montaigne. Since Bordeaux already had built a monument for him, the city council decided to fund a new edition of writings by the sixteenth-century author. The competition of cities sometimes tempted them into foolhardy projects. In 1834 an unscrupulous adventurer offered Marseille an obelisk from Luxor for the sum of 700,000 francs. Given that Paris had just installed its obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, it seemed fitting to the council that the second largest city in the kingdom would also have such a monument. It would also presumably become a major tourist attraction "for all of Southern Europe." Fortunately for the city, the transactions collapsed, for the obelisk was not the seller's to sell.18

If local heroes were the means to celebrate the city from which they had

sprung, many subjects for statuary were national figures. Thus, the building of statues for them indicated the city's participation in a national culture. The

emphasis after 1870 on the erection of Marianne statues (symbolizing the

Republic) obscured the extent to which Republicanism was supported by a

panopoly of iconography that clearly symbolized the Republic and its values in other ways. The statue of Marianne clearly represented the Republic, but it was the collection of the other statues that provided what Clifford Geertz has called "a cultural frame." In a now influential article, Geertz wrote that "political authority . . . requires a "cultural framework in which to define itself and advance its claims, and so does opposition to it." 19 An iconography

17 L. Boitel, Lyon, ancien et moderne (Lyon: L. Boitel, 1838), i; Conseil general des Bouches-du-Rh6ne, ler session ordinaire de 1894, Proces verbaux de deliberations, seance, 10 April 1894; Mayor of D6le, 10 April 1896, T 408, Archives du d6partement du Rh6ne (henceforth abbreviated as ADR).

18 Petite Gironde, 10 July 1905; Abbe Amaud d'Agnel, Marseille et le second obelisque de Louqsor (Valence: Imprimerie Valentinoise, 1906), 9.

19 Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual and Politics since the Middle Ages, Sean Wilentz, ed. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 25.




subordinate to Marianne but just as important was erected to advance Re- publican ideology and mark the territory with the imprint of the Republic.

The men considered the forerunners of the Republic-Voltaire and Jean- Jacques Rousseau, for example-were celebrated. The centennial of their death in 1878 occurred just as the Republic was being firmly established with the replacement of the MacMahon government by one of genuine Republicans. Innumerable banquets and public festivities occurred throughout France mark- ing the connection between the Republic and the illustrious eighteenth-century thinkers. The affinity was underscored by having one of the founders of the founders of the Republic and its most distinguished man of letters, Victor Hugo, give a national address celebrating Voltaire. The invocation of the purported twin intellectual founders of the Republic unleashed such passions that the Minister of Interior felt it necessary on the occasion of the centennial to forbid Parisians from public street manifestations lest powerful royalist coun- terdemonstrations lead to street riots. It was under the impact of the celebration for Voltaire and Rousseau that the political right in 1878 determined to adopt Joan of Arc as a symbol of its own.20

The philosophes were to be immortalized in statuary. In 1882 a prestigious national committee of important political leaders including the aged Louis Blanc started a fund drive to commemorate Rousseau, who, the committee proclaimed, should "be viewed as one of the fathers of democracy and the true founder of the French Republic." A very distinguished 1908 committee wished to erect a monument in Ermenonville for the author of Emile "to remind the passerby in a comprehensible style, what we have been, what we are, and what we shall become in following the path of the great inno- vator. '21

Erik Hobsbawm has claimed, in a too hasty remark, that the Republicans neglected to commemorate national historic figures in their statuary "because history since 1789 was a divisive rather than unifying force. ..." But history was often addressed in Republican statuary practices, although the Re- publicans certainly were selective in what they chose to celebrate. Moderates of the Third Republic tended to celebrate Revolutionary leaders with whom they could identify. Thus the city of Sevres erected a statue to both Georges Danton and Leon Gambetta, as they simultaneously represented nationalist zeal and moderate Republicanism. One of the most notable local initiatives to

20 Minister of Interior circular (reprinted in Petite Gironde, 25 May 1878); Jean-Marie Goulemot and Eric Walter, "Les centenaires de Voltaire et de Rousseau," La Republique, I, of Les lieux de memoire, 7 vols. Pierre Nora, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 388, 395-7, 403, 409; Rosemonde Sanson, "La 'fete de Jeanne d'Arc' en 1894-controverses et c6elbrations," Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine, 20 (July-September 1973), 446-7, 452-4; the extreme right quite successfully appropriated the Maid in the twentieth century, see Martha Hanna, "Iconology and Ideology: Images of Joan of Arc in the Idiom of the Action fran9aise, 1908- 1931," French Historical Studies, 14 (Fall 1985), 215-239.

21 Appeal of 4 August 1882 and 1908 program, T 408, A.D.R.



498 WILLIAM COHEN

commemorate Revolutionary leaders was the building of the memorial to the Girondins in Bordeaux. It was intended to combine a memorial to the city's revolutionary ancestors and the Republic at the same time; thus local patriotism was harnessed to the moderate Republicanism of the port city. The siting of the monument was also symbolic: It was built on the large square, the Quinconces, where the huge statue to Louis XVI was supposed to have been erected. Just as in 1793 when the Girondins had overcome the monarchy, so now their monument imposed itself on Bordeaux's largest square which had been intended for the memorial of a king.

The plan for the monument to the Girondins featured a tall column mounted by the statue of Marianne that was supposed to be surrounded by statues of the Girondin deputies. After spending 1.5 million francs, the city became dis- couraged, and so only the column with Marianne, surrounded by two large water fountains, was erected. In the words of one wag, the "monument to the Girondins has no Girondins."22

If this were a less effective illustration of Republican piety, there were many more successful examples. Early forerunners of Republicanism were celebrated; thus Jean-Baptiste Baudin, the deputy who had died on the bar- ricades protesting Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat was a deserving subject, as was the Republican leader, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin. The early fathers of the Third Republic, such as Jules Simon, Jules Ferry and Leon Gambetta, were worthy of being honored.23 Gambetta was particularly well suited since in addition to being a Republican figure, his leadership of the national defense in 1870 was a powerful symbol of nationalism.

The debates among Republicans over the suitability of erecting statues to their political forebears reflected their political divisions. The Marseille city council, governed by Opportunists, voted to erect a statue in 1880 for Ado-

Iphe Thiers, the founder of the Republic and native son, but the newly elected Radical majority, in light of Thiers's record as the repressor of the 1834 Paris uprising and that of the Commune, decided not to complete the statue in the

22 Erik Hobsbawm, "Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870-1914," The Invention of Tradition, Erik Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers, eds. (London, 1983), 272; "Comitd pour eriger a Sevres un monument a Danton et a Gambetta," Sevres, 6 February 1909, 3001 M3, Archives Municipales de Bordeaux (henceforth abbreviated as AMB); Jacques Dormoy, "Le monument a la memoire des Girondins," Revue historique de Bordeaux et du departement de la Gironde, (1955), 63. F. Z. Collombet, "Des Statues en general," Revue du Lyonnais, 12 (1840), 235.

23 For Baudin's statue, for example Marseille, see conseil municipal, Deliberations, 4 June 1886, 247; one of the rebels of Var in 1851, Martin-Bidoure, was also to be celebrated: "Souscription nationale pour l'erection d'un monument i la memoire de Martin-Bidoure," 1901, T 408, A.D.R.; for Ledru-Rollin, see for instance Conseil general des Bouches-du-Rh6ne, 2e session ordinaire de 1880, Proces verbaux de deliberations, seance 30 August 1880, 308; Ferry, Depeche de Toulouse, 27 July 1896; Conseil general meeting of Rhone, 12 April 1907, T 408, A.D.R.




following year. This subject generated considerable passion. It aggrieved the former city mayor to such a degree, according to the claims of a prominent local historian, that it led to the mayor's premature death from "crise du foie." In the Bordeaux City Council, Opportunists and Radicals could unite in their enthusiasm for a statue of Gambetta, a figure who fit well the moderate Republican tradition of the port city; but the Socialists, remembering Gambetta's easy dismissal of the social problem-"there is no social question"-voted against it. Overall, Gambetta was, however, a symbol of Re- publican concentration. Like the statue of Marianne, which had become a symbol of both the regime and the nation by the turn of the century, so Gambetta could also double up as a symbol. When the statue to Gambetta was erected in Bordeaux, a local Republican newspaper declared, "It is around his name, we like to regroup ourselves." The Gambetta statue was, the organizing committee declared, "the superb symbol of devotion to the Re- public and the fatherland. .. ."24 The location of the Gambetta statue in Bordeaux was significant: It was raised on the very spot where Napoleon III's statue had been unveiled with so much pomp a generation earlier-a striking manner of asserting the victory of Republicanism over the preceding regime.

The presidency of Sadi Carot had been undistinguished, but his assassina- tion created an outpouring of national feeling. Statues were erected for him all over France; only Gambetta among the Republican leaders was memorialized as often. A huge statue, 21 feet high, of Carnot was erected in Bordeaux by the municipality with funds of its own, plus those from the national government, 200 communes in the departement of the Gironde, 36 in nearby departements, and 40,000 individual donors who were each asked to contribute one franc. The Carot statue was to inspire Republican and national zeal by affirming the nation's gratitude "to those who have suffered, who have died for her." The inhabitants of Bordeaux were particularly eager to commemorate Carot because, in the words of the president of the Inaugural Commit- tee, Carot, like the Girondins, was a moderate who understood "that moderation is at the same time the necessity and glory of governments .. ."25

24 Conseil general des Bouches-du-Rh6ne, 2e session ordinaire de 1880, seance 30 August 1880, Proces verbaux des deliberations, 380; Marseille, conseil municipal, Deliberations, February 18, 1881, 88; Temps, 17 February, 1881, 20, 25 February, 9 March, 1881; Paul Masson, Les Bouches-du-Rh6ne: Encyclopedie departementale, XI (Marseille: Archives d6parte- mentales des Bouches-du-Rh6ne, 1926), 313; Petite Gironde, 3 December 1900; Speech by Bordeaux Mayor Daney at inaugural, Petite Gironde, 26 April, 1905; Petite Gironde, 9 June 1903, similar phrases in the attempt of the city of Sevres to raise monies for monuments for both Danton and Gambetta, "Comite pour eriger a Sevres un monument a Danton et a Gambetta," 10 August 1908, T 408. A.D.R.; a similar role was played by the statue to Gambetta erected in Paris in the Carousel garden facing the Arc de Triomphe, June Hargrove, "Les statues de Paris," in "La Nation, II, Pt. 3 of Les lieux de memoire, Pierre Nora, ed. (Paris, 1986), 255.

25 Note, May 9, 1896, 3016 M1, AMB; "Anon, "Le Monument Carnot a Bordeaux," Bordeaux, 1896.



500 WILLIAM COHEN

Thus this monument to a national figure served to celebrate and propagate the dominant local political values.

Erecting statues was a way of symbolically indicating the success of Re- publican concentration-the burying of differences that had divided the Re- publican factions in the past. If the city council of Marseille was as yet unwilling to support the erection in 1887 of a statue to Franqois Raspail, because he was deemed too revolutionary, others were more willingly supported. Local pride in the career of the Lyonnais Communard, Desire Bar- odet, brought even the support of a right-wing Catholic municipal councillor in 1910. The Lyon Commune was safely in the past: "Our duty is to obliterate the differences which separate us and only remember. . . services [to the

community]." Thus this Red anticlerical figure was given a monument with right-wing Catholic support. Appeals for a statue to the revolutionary Louis Blanqui, were phrased in a manner to attract wide Republican support. His hometown attempted to raise national funding for "this martyr of free thought," worthy of support from all those believing in the "lay, Republican, and social" ideal. Armand Barbes was to be commemorated as the incarnation of the French Revolution in the nineteenth century; he was, the advocate for his memorialization insisted, such a great man that "he is above parties. He belongs to humanity .. ."26

Local political alliances were cemented by erecting statues. The celebration of radicals by representatives of the bourgeoisie was an indication of their ambition to continue coalition politics-to be all inclusive and to continue winning the support of the modest strata of society. The building of a statue to the Toulousaine was a physical witness of the Radical-Socialist municipal coalition in Toulouse. The Toulousaine was the city song, but it was physically represented by a seven-and-one-half meter statue (in bronze) of a woman worker dressed in factory dress, "short skirt and straw hat." The decision to represent the city song in this manner was a clear bow in the direction of the electorate of the Radicals' allies, the Socialists.27

Monuments to individual Republicans were often intended to symbolize the incarnation of certain values associated with the Republic. The son of an artisan who ended up being the president of the chamber of deputies (Auguste Burdeaux) received a monument in Lyon. At its inaugural the Minister of Commerce traced the life of the political figure to illustrate the promise of social ascension that the Republic held out to the classes Gambetta had called "les couches nouvelles." The statue to Jules Simon celebrated not only the

26 Marseille, Conseil municipal, Deliberations, 22 September 1887, 408; seance 27 June 1910, Bulletin officiel de le muncipalite de Lyon, 289; circular from Comit6 pour l'6rection d'un monument a Auguste Blanqui a Puget-Th6niens," 10 March 1904, T 408, A.D.R.; Circular from Marcou, president of the conseil g6enral of Aude to build a statue in Barbes' hometown, Carcassonne, n.d., T 408, A.D.R.

27 Depeche de Toulouse, 7 July 1900, 3 January 1901.



STATUES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE 50I

statesman but also the message of his career: "The modest breton peasant who from the most humble origins, by his intelligence raised himself to the

highest levels. . ."28 A statue to Jean Mace, the founder of the Ligue Francaise de 1'enseignement that had agitated for free, universal, lay educa- tion beginning in 1866 was obviously a reminder of the efforts of the Republic in that realm. If the Girondins were not given their statue, the monument in Bordeaux nevertheless clearly celebrated the virtues of Republicanism. The pillar was surrounded by huge water fountains with powerful horse-driven chariots surrounded by statuary representing "military service, security, power and public instruction" overcoming "mendacity, vice and igno- rance. 29

Political groups of the Right or the Left, if locally weak, could gather courage in the rightness of their cause by the manipulation of symbols indicating connections to a larger world. From mid-century when universal male suffrage was instituted until the development of modern political parties after the turn of the century, statues-building them, celebrating them, and gather- ing around them-was a way of imagining, creating, and asserting membership in a common political culture.

Anticlericalism, particularly important in large urban milieus once the Re- publicans came to power, was strongly reflected in impassioned debates on statuary. Those erected in earlier times, which upheld religious values, were vulnerable targets for anticlerical city councils. In Toulouse a municipal council appointed by the conservative, clerical MacMahon regime voted to erect a statue to Saint Germain in 1874. In the following year an elected Republican city council voted to tear down what had been built, but the mayor, still appointed by the regime favorable to conservative religious values, continued building. In 1881 when both council and mayor were Republican, and even Radical, the council decided to remove the statue. This measure was met by resistance from the faithful. For the Archbishop of Toulouse and his fol- lowers, this was not just the disposal of a piece of statuary but rather an "attack against God and his saints." In the face of resistance from the believers who had surrounded the statue, police, aided by a battalion from the Fiftieth regiment and forty gendarmes on horseback after six hours of physical confrontation, including a cavalry charge, were able to carry out their mission. A large religious demonstration was then called to "expiate" for this

28 Petite Gironde, 1 July 1903, 13 July 1903. 29 Delie Muller, "Monument aux Girondians, les bassins," Musee d'Aquitaine (Bordeaux,

1982). 30 Louis Ariste and Louis Braud, Histoire populaire de Toulouse (Toulouse: Midi r6publicain,

1898), 760; T. Baurens de Molinier, Souvenirs d'un vieux chanoine (Paris, Victor Retaux, n.d. [1905?]), 397; Marie-France Brive, "La politique dconomique de la ville de Toulouse de 1870 a 1880." (Unpublished Dipl6me d'6tudes superieures, University of Toulouse, 1967); Temps, 24, 25 June, 5, 10, 17 July 1881.



502 WILLIAM COHEN

evil.30 In Marseille, a statue to Bishop Henri Belsunce (he had played a heroic role during the black-death epidemic of 1720) was the subject of considerable controversy in that city. The municipal councillor proposing its removal was beaten up by what Le Temps described as "several young people from among aristocratic and Catholic circles." Riots over the matter led to the arrest of 127 people. In the end the statue was moved from the open public space to a sheltered, enclosed museum.31 By placing the statue in a museum rather than destroying it, the Republicans were revealing their moderation-compared to the iconoclastic behavior of revolutionary mobs-by calmly and firmly show-

ing that the Republic now dominated urban space. A favored way to uphold anticlericalism was to remind the public of the

victims of the Catholic Church. A national commission including such celebrated proponents of secular humanism as Anatole France, Edouard Herriot, and Charles Seignobos sponsored the building of a statue to Michael Servetus, persecuted by the Catholic Church but actually burnt at the stake by the authorities of Calvin's Geneva. The prospectus does not clearly identify the exact executioners; it refers to them only as people of "zealous orthodoxy." (While the anticlericals were opposed to all religions, the Roman Catholic Church was the main target of their animus; clarity here would only appear to blur their struggle. )32 The Radical Municipality of Lyon under the leadership of Edouard Herriot found, as so many places in France did, an ideal figure in Etienne Dolet to celebrate and use as a foil against the Church. He was a

sixteenth-century Lyonnais freethinker, a printer, and a brawler who had killed a man in a fit of anger. Pardoned by the king for this act, his persistent attacks on religion earned him condemnation as a heretic and burning at the stake in Paris in 1546. The debate over the erection of a statue in Lyon for Etienne Dolet was lengthy, filling eight pages of the printed council minutes for 1913.33 The

opponents of the statue argued that Dolet, being dishonest and guilty of murder, was unworthy of memorialization, and public monies should therefore not be

spent on this obviously controversial figure. The supporters of the statue stressed Dolet's importance as a forerunner of free thought, of the values embodied in laicisme, while they neglected to mention events in Dolet's

personal life that might tarnish his image. Both opponents and proponents carried on extensive historic research to buttress their arguments; each side

selectively quoted from the French translation of Richard Copley Christie's Etienne Dolet: The Martyr of the Renaissance.34 The proponents representing the dominant Radical majority found the debate an opportunity for a sweeping

31 Temps, 5 June, 4 July, 7 July, 1878. 32 "Comit6 du monument Michel Serve, Vienne(Isere), 11 January 1906. 33 Bulletin officiel de la municipalite de Lyon, 4 November 1913, 152-9. 34 Richard Copley Christie, Etienne Dolet, le Martyr de la renaissance, sa vie et sa mort,

Casimir Stryienski, trans. (Paris: Fischbacher, 1886).




attack on Church history: "The Church killed, burned . . . methodically and systematically, it was regularly and indefatigably ferocious."' For this majority on the Lyon City Council it was only natural that a council reflecting "the lay democratic republic" erect this monument as a form of reparation for "one of the greatest crimes."35 Much to the consternation of believers, the statue was erected in front of the symbol of the Lyon Catholic revival, the Fourviere Cathedral. Built on the hill dominating the city, the cathedral was intended as a form of expiation for the Commune-in the same spirit as the erection of the Sacre Coeur in Paris. As a Republican newspaper put it, the Dolet statue and its placement were appropriate for one to "erect in front of the Basilica of the Fourviere, a symbol of the past, a monument to free thought, a symbol of the future." 36 The square containing Bordeaux's Etienne Dolet statue was to be the site for anticlerical demonstrations in the midst of the passions unleashed by the separation of church and State in 1905. In Paris, a huge flower wreath inscribed with the words "To Etienne Dolet, assassinated by the priests" was deposited in front of the Dolet statue located on Place Maubert where he had been hanged and burnt in 1546, while anticlericals marched around the statue yelling "Long live Combes! Long live the separation." Supporters of the Church clashed with the anticlericals, and the police had to be called out.37

The church was to be confronted by a counterculture-that of Republican- ism; its edifices were even to be marked by a Republican imprint. In Marseille the city council voted to chisel into all public buildings, including religious ones, the motto of the Republic, "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity."38

More indirectly, Republicanism could be celebrated and the Church at- tacked by memorializing scientists who were commonly understood to symbolize religious heterodoxy. This was so well understood that during the Second Empire, the Imperial Zoological Society, in desiring that a monument for the eighteenth-century naturalist Louis Daubenton be erected, seemed to feel it necessary to accompany its request with a reassurance to authorities that science was not necessarily in opposition to the Scriptures. Under the Re- public, it was affirmed that scientists were men of intelligence daring to ask new questions and overthrow the authority of received wisdom; it was in recognition of these attributes that scientists were being memorialized. The father of positivism, Auguste Comte, was commemorated on the occasion of his hundredth birthday in 1900, by a statue that was a message of "sane philosophy" to the youth of the Left Bank of Paris in whose midst the Comte bust was placed. Erected in Paris, it was a national and even international

35 Bulletin officiel de la municipalite de Lyon, 4 November 1913, 153-4. 36 Nouvelliste, quoted in Anonymous, Une infamie- la statue d'Etienne Dolet en face de la

Basilique de Fourviere (Lyon, 1912). In front of the Sacre-Coeur in Paris, a statue to a freethinker had also been erected: that of Chevalier de la Barre.

37 Petite Gironde, 7 August 1905; reported in Depeche de Toulouse, 8 August 1904. 38 Meeting, 15 July 1878, Marseille, conseil municipal, Deliberations, 266-7.



504 WILLIAM COHEN

effort. Three hundred sponsors and 1,250 subscribers in thirty countries con- tributed to the erection of this memorial in favor of the man after whom, the sponsors said, the nineteenth century would be named.39

If statuary could have an international dimension in the sense that donors from several nations were solicited for donations, the lack of monuments to foreigners was striking. There were some exceptions. For instance the City of Dijon decided to erect a statue to Garibaldi, but he was seen mainly as worthy of memorialization because of his volunteering to fight for France in the Franco-Prussian war, rather than because of his career in Italy.40 Frenchmen and their contribution to the nation were the fit subjects of celebration. This was the point of statues: to help create an imagined community of Frenchmen. This understanding of statuary had already been expressed by a provincial committee in the 1830s: "A people without a cult for its illustrious citizens is a people . . . without a future and nearly without a fatherland, for the fa-

therland, is made of the ashes of our fathers, it is the memory of our ancestors."41 Statues best celebrated this sense of fatherland. Many monuments were specifically raised by locales to profess their nationalism. While this was done, Republicanism was being simultaneously affirmed. The French Revo- lution, while establishing a Republic, had also unleashed French nationalism. It therefore appeared to be natural for the Republicans-a century later-as heirs to the Revolution, to see the twin ideologies of Republicanism and nationalism as intertwined and possibly even identical. As the founders of a

regime that came to power upon the defeat of an authoritarian regime, the

Republicans in affirming their love of the nation were suggesting that they were better fit to protect it. In proposing to establish a monument to the

Lyonnais who had successfully resisted the Prussians at Belfort in 1870 on the site of the former Napoleon III statue, the Lyon City Council was suggesting that the Republicanism of the city was connected with the patriotism of its soldiers-in juxtaposition to the shame and defeat of the Second Empire. With the erection of the statue, the council members said, "We shall engrave on . . . [the] young hearts the salvatory name of the Republic! and we shall leave to history to teach them about December 2nd., Sedan, Metz!"42 The enhancement of nationalism thus also promoted the Republic.

39 Drouyn de Lhuys, "Projet d'elever une statue a Daubenton," Societe imperiale zoologique (1861); Association scientifique de France, "Souscription pour elever un monument a la memoire de Le Verrier," (1878); M. A. Vachez," Histoire de la Statue d'Andr6-Marie Am- pere," Memoires de l'acaddmie des sciences, belles lettres et arts de Lyon, 2nd ser., 26 (1889), 293-313; Coru, "Inauguration de la statue d'Andre-Marie Ampere," Me'moires de l'acaddmie des sciences, belles lettres et arts de Lyon, 2nd ser. Memoires, 26 (1889), 315-22; "La statue d'Auguste Comte," Bulletin mensuel, no. 1 (1900), copy in T 408, A.R.

40 "Monument a elever sur une des places publiques de Dijon a la m6moire du G6enral Garibaldi," August 1898, 3001 M3, AMB.

41 "Commission centrale du monument a elever a Ambroise Pare," 1836, F 21. 588, Ar- chives nationales (henceforth, abbreviated as "A.N.")

42 Commision Report, seance 9 August 1873, Lyon, Proces verbal, 183.




Ancient and more recent symbols from history could be mobilized for nationalist purposes. Vercingetorix, the Gaul chieftain who had resisted the Romans under Julius Caesar, was given a monument in Bordeaux. Although the Aquitaine region was not known for resisting the Romans, he seemed an apt "example of devotion and sacrifice to the national cause. .. .43 A monument erected by Clermond-Ferrand in the region where Vercingetorix had successfully withstood Caesar was to remind the Gallic chieftain's de- scendants that they "must unite their efforts for the glorification of a com- bative and armed France."44 A statue of a Gallic warrior carried insignia of a Gallic cock, which was an anachronistic but significant symbol of nationalist Republicanism of the nineteenth century projected onto antiquity.45 Military heroes of the ancien regime could also be glorified by connecting them to more recent tragedies in French national history. Louis XIV's Marshall de Villars, who had victoriously fought in Northern France, was to be commemorated because he had presumably saved all of France from "invasion and dismemberment.' 46 A study of statuary in Paris found a reluctance after 1870 to celebrate military figures because of presumable bitterness over military defeat and the fear of military rule, especially after General Boulanger in the 1880s aspired to one-man rule; yet no such pattern developed in the provinces.47 Rather, revolutionary and imperial figures were often seen as fit subjects to remind the nation of its past acts of heroism and inspire them to future militancy. The simple soldier known as the drummer of Arcola, who joined the revolutionary armies at the age of fifteen and then continued to serve under Napoleon, should be memorialized to inform "our soldiers . . . that their courage can be rewarded by the supreme recompense" of statuary.48 A statue to Louis Desaix, the victor of Marengo, would reward him for his achievements but also "develop patriotic sentiment in our young generation."9 3tatues to national heroes were also intended to provide a message to France's ritlghbors. A statue to the Revolutionary soldier, Theophile La Tour d'Auvergne, the first grenadier of the Republic, was not only intended to inspire future generations of Frenchmen but inform foreigners "that the generations which are coming will, if the occasion requires it, be inspired by the example of their elders .. ."50

43 Bordeaux Conseil Municipal, s6ance 5 February 1889. 44 "Comit6 du monument de Verceng6torix," Clermont-Ferrand, 6 January 1899, 3001 M3,

AMB. 45 Jacqueline Guerrier, "L'imagerie gauloise a Sens," Nos ancetres Gaulois. Actes du col-

loque international de Clermont Ferrand, Paul Viallaneix and Jean Ehrard, eds. (Clermont- Ferrand: Presses universitaires de Clermont-Ferrand, 1982), 289.

46 "Erection d'une statue au Mar6chal de Villars," 15 September 1893, 3001 M3, AMB. 47 Hargrove, "Les statues de Paris," 256. 48 "Monument a elever a la m6moire du Tambour d'Arcole," n.d. [received 29 May 1893],

3001 M3, AMB. 49 "Monument Desaix," Saint-Gervais d'Auvergne (Puy de Dome), n.d. [1890s], 3001 M3,

AMB. 50 "Monument de la Tour d'Auvergne," 1897, T 408, A.D.R.



506 WILLIAM COHEN

Not all appeals to celebrate revolutionary and Napoleonic figures were as unambiguous. Edmond Dubois-Crance, who together with Lazare Carot had led the victorious Revolutionary armies, was to be memorialized by his hometown. It intended to build a statue for him, contributing 1000 francs (a large sum for the town) and appealed to other government units for financial as- sistance. In soliciting the Council General of the Rhone, the town tried to disassociate the general from the sacking of Lyon in 1793. The council, unconvinced, did not contribute.51 At times, probably suspecting the motives of the sponsors, local government units were reluctant to fund nationalistic monuments. It may be because of the ties between Boulangists and Bonapar- tists, that the general council of the Rhone was less than forthcoming in 1889 to fund the statue to General Desaix. Nor was a statue for a marshal of the second empire, sponsored by a national committee including royal princes, Bonapartist notables and the nationalist Paul Deroulede seen as a suitable project to support by the Republican General Council of the Bouches-du- Rhone. (And the departmental prefect specifically advised against it.)52

Joan of Arc was a complex figure to commemorate. The right felt that she was a symbol of religion and faith; the left-in view of her appropriation by the right-felt that she had to be redefined in order to be worthy of memorialization. This was particularly important to do in 1878 when the political right attempted to use her as a rallying point to counter the celebrations connected with the Voltaire and Rousseau centennial. Interestingly enough, it was exactly that same year (1878) when the left-wing mayor of the small commune of Crotoy, the town in which Joan was held prior to being burnt on the stake, insisted that she was the "heroic daughter of the people, who in the midst of the treason of the notables and the men of the court for the first time affirmed the face of the French patrie." Thus he upheld her as a figure representing the common people and anticlericalism. Right-wing groups wanting a more general support for monuments to the Maid of Orleans em- phasized her as a symbol of national unity. A national commission presided over by Jules Meline, deputy from the Vosges, argued the need for all Frenchmen to help finance a monument in Domremy in front of Joan of Arc's

birthplace "to affirm the union and solidarity of all French cantons in regard to patriotism."53

51 Ville de Rethel, 18 August 1895, T 408. A.D.R. 52 Conseil g6enral des Bouches-du-Rh6ne, ler session ordinaire de 1889, Proces verbaux des

deliberations (Marseille: L. Sauvion, 1889), 235; "Souscription nationale pour l'6rection d'un monument a la m6moire du Mar6chal Canrobert a Saint-Cere (Lot)," 1895, T 408, A.D.R.

53 Goulemot and Walter, "Les centenaires," loc. cit.; Anon., Un monument Lyonnais d Jeanne d'Arc, Pourquoi? (Lyon: Grange et Refoubelet, 1910), 10; Seance 10 July 1878, Com- mune de Crotoy (D6partement of Somme), copy in T. 408, A.D.R.; Conseil g6enral des Bouches-du-Rh6ne, 2e session ordinaire de 1880, Proces verbaux de deliberations, seance 20 August 1880, 100-1, seance 24 August 1880, 112-3; "Monument national a elever a l'honneur de Jeanne d'Arc devant la maison ou elle est n6e a Domremy (Vosge)," 12 June 1890, 3001, AMB.




One of the glories with which the Republic covered itself was the colonial exploits that it celebrated with monuments. Much of colonial expansion occurred in rivalry against Great Britain, so colonial figures who had resisted British expansion in an earlier age seemed fitting figures to be celebrated. Since Britain had memorialized the historic battle of Montcalm against Wolff in Canada in the eighteenth century, the mayor of Vauvert (the village of Montcalm's birth) asked whether it was not deplorable if "we could not honor our French hero? . . ..54 Various Frenchmen who had spearheaded expansion overseas were celebrated. Saint-Quentin built one to the conqueror and administrator of French Senegal, Faidherbe. A statue to Marcele Treich- Laplene, explorer in French West Africa who died in 1890, was to celebrate the civilizing mission of France. Treich-Laplene was credited with spreading "in countries as yet subject to the abominable customs of slavery, polygamy and human sacrifice, the precious seeds of our civilization."55 The explorer of Indochina, Ernest Doudart de Lagree, was to be memorialized with a monument, and all Frenchmen "who are interested in the glory of our navy and the development of our colonial empire" were asked to provide subsidies. The City Council of Bordeaux voted funds in honor of Doudart who "created new inroads for our national commerce. .. ."56

Colonial exploits and their heroes were intended to "reconcile all French- men regardless of their opinions [by providing] national pride," although not all Frenchmen viewed overseas conquest from the same perspective. Toulouse erected a memorial to a colonial explorer killed in Africa. At its inaugural, at least three different views were articulated. The prefect, representing the Opportunist central government that outrightly favored coloni- alism, saw the monument as a celebration of love of fatherland; the Radical city council, more ambiguously inclined toward colonies, saw the monument as an affirmation "that we do not forget those who fell in the battlefield." Finally, Jean Jaures, the Socialist opponent of overseas military expeditions, chose to view the memorial as a way of providing remembrance to "noble young men felled before their time .. ."57

After the war of 1870-71, innumerable monuments were raised to the soldiers and war dead. They commemorated their sacrifice, but they also were

54 Mayor of Vauvert (Gard) to president of Conseil G6enral, 2 April 1908. 55 "Oeuvre du monument Faidherbe a Saint-Quentin," 25 February 1908; "Comit6 pour

1'6rection d'un monument au Capitaine Menard," 1895, T 408, A.D.R.; "Monument Treich- Laplene", n.d. [1890s], 3001 M3, AMB.

56 "Comit6 pour 1'erection d'un monument a Doudart de Lagr6e," May, 1891, 3001 M3, AMB.

57 Depeche de Toulouse, 12 October 1897. Similarly (in the council general of the Gironde), a Socialist councilor argued that the least that could be done for the French dead of the Madagascar expedition was to build a monument for them, thus memorializing those who died "in adventures in which the owners of property and capital profit. Since a man must fight when he owns nothing . . . it is right that those for whom he ran all the dangers, risked his life, don't forget him." Session of 17 April 1896, Conseil g6enral of Gironde.



508 WILLIAM COHEN

intended to help mobilize the young for future wars, express anti-Germanism, and help prepare for the day of revanche (revenge). In the French part of Lorraine, it was important to raise a statue to the French soldiers killed at the Battle of Bruville:

Two feet from the border, we see each day numerous monuments being raised by the Germans to their soldiers; our patriotism requires us also to raise this monument of pious memory and ultimate hope.58

Another statue raised also on France's Eastern border and placed "at the gates of our hereditary enemy" was to inspire the young as "an example of courage and devotion" but also to provide "the symbol of hope" for "those living on the other side of the mountain"-the Alsatians annexed by Germany.59

Memorials were not just celebrations of acts of heroism but were intended to have a strong national message and to prepare the nation for possible future wars:

To assure the country of brave men who will defend it, we must create an elevated spirit and there is no better way of doing so than to uphold the ideal of the Fatherland ... 60

This could be done best by "the glorification of those who bravely gave their lives in the defense of the Fatherland.''61 The memory of the war was to be a torch to be passed on from generation to generation, proclaimed an official

inaugurating a war monument in Marseille.62 The nature of the statuary was also intended to do the same: A statue in Saint-Quentin, for example, showed a wounded soldier, his dropped gun being picked up by a child.63 Monuments to the war dead of the Franco-Prussian war were intended at times to suggest that the territorial settlement coming out of that conflict was not to last. The

president of the Veterans Organization of the Haute-Garonne declared, in

inaugurating a monument thirty years after the hostilities, that it was intended above all

58 "Souscription nationale pour l'6rection d'un monument a la mdmoire des Alsaciens-Lor- rains morts pour la France en 1870-71 et depuis, dans les exp6ditions coloniales," 1901, T 408, A.D.R.; "Monument a la d6fense nationale a eriger a la m6moire des soldats tu6s en 1870- 1871," 2 October 1885, 3001 M3, AMB; Mayor of Bruville (Meurthe et Moselle) to Mayor of Bordeaux, 5 March 1892, 3001 M3, AMB.

59 "Monument comm6moratif militaire. Remiremont (Vosges)," 31 August 1893, 3001 M3, AMB.

60 A. Vigneau, "Rapport g6neral sur la question du monument departemental aux enfants de la Gironde morts pour la patrie, 1870-1871," Seance of 16 December 1910, Conseil g6enral, Gironde.

61 Ibid., 9. 62 Petit Provencal, 27 March 1894. 63 Clement de Lacroix, Les morts pour la patrie- tombes militaires et monuments elevds a la

memoire des soldats tuds pendant la guerre (Paris: Author, 1891), 16.




to remind us that if in the past justice was defeated, the triumph of force is odious and ephemeral when force is no longer serving justice.64

More directly, a monument to Lyon to the war of 1870 was intended to remind the children there that in Alsace-Lorraine, "brothers violently sepa- rated from the Motherland are awaiting their deliverance."65 A memorial to the Battle of Chateaudon was intended as "an encouragement to those who one day will take our revanche .. ."66

The war monuments actively mobilized the public. The 40-foot monument built in Marseille was built in part by a public subscription coming from 47,000 inhabitants of the Bouches-du-Rhone departement individually contributing between 200 francs and 15 centimes. The administrator of the "Sou- venir franqais," the national organization memorializing the war dead of 1870, noted that monuments were the sites "every year, at each anniversary of patriotic pilgrimages."67 In a nation that found itself confronted with the need for a conscription army after 1871, the various symbols of nationalism upheld it. The school, but also the monument, asserted the existence of a national community and upheld the glory of fighting and even dying for it.

Nationalist oratory was often employed in making appeals for aid in funding a monument. If Dole had a statue for Louis Pasteur, nearby Arbois (where the scientist had gone to school) also wished to assert itself by erecting a statue for him. The town hoped to win subsidies from other towns and departements by claiming that this statue was of national importance.68 The town of Muret in the Haute Garonne wanted to erect a statue to a relatively unknown local musician. It expressed the hope that since he had popularized French music abroad the project would be met by "the sentiments of solidarity which should unite the children of the same country."69 National fund raising was the only way for small, impoverished communes to help finance their statues. The small town of Romainville (Seine) with a population of 2,400 wished to erect a bust to Paul de Kock, a native son who was a writer of some note. Its

original way of trying to collect the needed funds was to write each of the 37,000 communes in France and to ask each one for a one franc-contribution. Even large cities often made appeals to other government bodies and the general public for funds. Cherbourg argued that all of France should contribute to a statue for the painter Franqois Millet, for he constituted a source of "national glory of which all of France should be proud." Some statues were

64 Depeche de Toulouse, 20 August 1901. 65 Commission report, Proces verbaux, City of Lyon, 9 August 1873, 183. 66 Letter from Mayor of Chateaudun (Eure et Loire) to Mayor of Bordeaux, 21 May 1891,

3001 M3, AMB. 67 Rapport present6 au conseil municipal par M. G. Girard, meeting 8 December 1891, F 1.,

C. I, 40, A.N.; Lacroix, 8. 68 Ville d'Arbois (Jura), "Monument Pasteur," 30 October, 1895, 3001 M3, AMB. 69 Letter (undated) from Muret in 3001M3, AMB.



510 WILLIAM COHEN

extremely expensive. The monument to the Girondins as already mentioned cost over 1.5 million francs. While the Bordeaux City Council paid a third of the 180,000 francs for a huge statue to Gambetta in Bordeaux, the rest was raised from numerous sources. The benefactors included the French state, the conseil general of the Gironde and thirty-four other councils, the Chamber of Commerce of Bordeaux, railroad companies, the Bank of France, the Navy, secondary schools from all over France, the Union of Gymnastic Societies of France, 539 municipalities in France, and 40,000 individual subscribers. The individual contributions were often small-a large city council might only contribute 50 or 100 francs for the monument of another town. Grenoble provided subsidies between 1870 and 1903 for monuments in thirty other towns. Its contributions varied from 50 francs for a statue for Faidherbe, Joan of Arc and Victor Hugo, to 500 francs for the Gambetta monument in Bor- deaux. Paris alone was given a subsidy thirteen times; Grenoble agreed to support the erection of statuary in another municipality forty-two different times. These demands for subsidies were so regular that the municipality of Bordeaux had a form letter of refusal that claimed it had decided not to provide any, regardless of the merits of the case, because of the high request for subsidies. In fact, it found that some of the projects were so deserving and celebrated a figure so important, that it could not refuse funding. For instance, the Bordeaux City Council, believing that maybe Moliere had performed in its city, voted a subsidy for a bust to the playwright in Bezenas, a commune where there was inconvertible evidence that the dramatist had performed.70 Municipalities not only shaped the symbols adorning their own squares but as the result of national fund drives took positions as to which sorts of messages in marble and bronze they favored in cities and towns near and far.

Statuary was used to a considerable degree in the nineteenth century to provide social and political messages. It was neither a monopoly of the Revolution nor its Republican heirs, since it was also used by royalists. It was truly a national phenomena, not in the sense that it was necessarily centrally planned and coordinated, but rather because it had become the mode of communicating important messages by small and large communes, by rich and poor departements, by governmental bodies and voluntary groups dedi- cated to varying ideals. It underscored the extent to which a national set of cultural representations had developed, thus facilitating claims of legitimacy and the process of government.

70 "Comite pour 1'6rection d'une statue a Paul de Kock, 1901," 3001 M3, AMB; "Statue a Francois Millet, Ville de Cherbourg," 1 February 1887, 3001 M3, AMB; "Proces verbaux de la remise officielle a la municipalite Bordelaise du monument elev6 a Leon Gambetta," [1905] 3019 M1, AMB; "Souscriptions accordees par la ville de Grenoble pendant la periode 1870- 1903 pour 1'6rection de statues ou de monuments publics," [1903] 3001 M3, AMB; Letter from Mayor of Bezenas to Mayor of Bordeaux, 22 December 1895, 3001 M3, AMB.




Agulhon has argued in a recent essay that the statuary celebrating the

Republic in the years after 1870 "was not a systematic, general enterprise of those in power . . . but the products of local influences. ..."7 This seems to lessen their importance in Agulhon's view, yet it meant the contrary- suggesting spontaneous adherence, a grassroots movement, which is why this paper has deliberately chosen to ignore the development of public monuments in the capital and exclusively concentrate on their placement on sites in the provinces. Though these symbols took many forms, they were no less important and spread a fairly clear message throughout most of the land. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in describing how royal authority attempted to establish control over a state, observed that "though a king could not, like God, quite be everywhere at once, he could try, at least, to give the impres- sion that he was." He could travel throughout this realm and "mark it, like some wolf or tiger spreading his scent through his territories, as almost physically part of them."72 The advance of Republican statuary physically marked the conquest and allegiance of the locale to the new regime.

A monument to Marianne was a clear and unambiguous sign, but Re- publicanism was further supported by the additional symbols, provided by attempts, less direct but perhaps as powerful, to celebrate the Republic and spread the values for which it stood. They strengthened and underscored the obvious monuments; they placed them in a general context. Being oblique, these symbols did not immediately gain as strong resistance from the unconvinced and thus may have worked more effectively in the end than explicit monuments. Messages that are unconsciously communicated can be more powerful than explicit ones, as a writer on French political symbolism observed:

with their appeal to the imagination and collective memory of a people rather than to their intelligence and to their ability to conjure up vague ideas and unconscious emotions, . . . symbols sometimes exert a more decisive influence than do events, individuals or institutions.73

71 Maurice Agulhon, "Politics, Images, and Symbols in Post-Revolutionary France," Rites of Power, Sean Wilentz, ed., 194.

72 Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," Rites, 25,16. Some excellent examples of how royalty attempted to mark its possession of the kingdom by effecting a national tour are given in the description of the tour of Charles IX and the Mother Queen Catherine of Mddicis in 1564 and of Louis XIV in 1643, in Bernard Guen6e, "Des limites feodales aux frontieres politiques," La Nation, Pt. 2 of Les lieux de mdmoire, Pierre Nora, ed. 28, 40.

73 Gilbert Gadoffre, "French National Images and the Problem of National Stereotypes," International Social Science Bulletin (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Orga- nization), III (Autumn 1951), 579.



512 WILLIAM COHEN

Agulhon sees a certain decline in the power of statuary in the nineteenth century as compared to the era of the French Revolution but that is a heady norm by which to measure events or processes in French history. It is clear that statuary was still taken very seriously in the period up to 1914 when a large number of monuments were erected; thereafter the number declined. A quantitative examination of statuary in Paris reveals that in the years 1914-40 the average yearly number declined to a third as many as during the preceding period (1870-1914). Up to 1914 statues mattered to the extent that they were the subject of strong controversy; they were not met by the indifference that Mona Ozouf sees as typical of the present day.74

In the absence of firm political authority (such as during revolutionary outbreaks) crowds spontaneously stormed statues, tore them down, and hacked them to pieces-a telling indication of the intensity of feeling that these statues aroused. The need to call troops out in removing statuary, the bitterness of city council debates, the politically motivated vandalism aimed for instance against statues raised after the turn of the century celebrating the heroic caste of characters, who had fought the good fight during the Dreyfus affair, reveal that these symbols were thought of as important.75

Monuments were ways of constructing and communicating a political culture. The spread of Republican statuary indicated the advance of the regime in the country, the rallying of the various towns and villages through most of France to the regime, and the process was no less real if done by each locale on its own initiative-on the contrary.

The intensity of the process of statumania was in part a function of political crises. The anthropologist Myron J. Aronoff suggested that

political myths tend to play a particularly crucial role in times of crises. At times of societal disorder, or of a threat to societal order, an important means of mobilizing collective action is through the use of myths to generate collective responses to collective commitments and responsibilities.76

Indeed the whole era from the founding of the Republic until 1914 was

perceived as critical for the regime, and it may well be the feeling of crisis and vulnerability of the Republic that explains the intensity with which ideals were affirmed in marble, granite and bronze.

The statuary erected in later years was not to be met with indifference

74 Hargrove, "Statues de Paris," 271; Mona Ozouf, "Le Panth6on-l'6cole normale des morts," La Republique, I, of Les lieux de memoire, Pierre Nora, ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 163.

75 Eugene Weber, Action Francaise-Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962), 42.

76 Myron J. Aronoff, "Ideology and Interest: The Dialectics of Politics," Political An- thropology, Yearbook, I, Myron J. Aronoff, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1980), 17-18.




either. That the statues to the various Republican figures were understood to be important political statements may be seen in the systematic way in which the Vichy regime assaulted the memorials to what had become a discredited Republic.77

77 The indifference to statuary after World War I may have been exaggerated by Ozouf. Frenchmen registered some concern over the smelting down of the Republican statuary during Vichy and the German occupation; in Paris an official bulletin recognized the "legitimate and touching emotion of the populations who see the disappearance of the well known monument which is dear to them." In the provinces, the authorities had to deal with popular opposition to removal of statuary: Hargrove, "Statues de Paris," 274-5.



Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France

Documents

Transcript of Symbols of Power: Statues in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France