Géricault`s Wounded Male

Transcription

Géricault’s Wounded Male
An interpretation of the Raft of the Medusa (1819)
within the context of the early French Restoration
Thomas Hoareau 2011
UWA Master’s Thesis
I would like to thank the University of Western Australia, ALVA, the Graduate Research
School of UWA and the University Library Services for their assistance in my academic
study. I wish to also graciously acknowledge the support of the following people who, in
no small way, contributed to the completion of this Master’s Thesis: Ian McLean, Clarissa
Ball, Rosanna Marchesani, Simon Anderson, Daniel Brown, Russell Hays, Régis Michel,
Bruno Chenique, Theo and Joanne Hoareau.
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Contents
List of Illustrations
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Introduction
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1 The Raft of the Medusa (1819) in the context of the French Restoration
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2 Géricault’s Wounded Male
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3 Raft of the Medusa
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Select Bibliography
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List of Illustrations
Géricault, Raft of the Medusa (1819)
Géricault, Start of the Barberi Race (1817)
Géricault, Fualdès’ body thrown into water (1818)
Géricault, detail of Six Studies for Corréad and Savigny in the ‘Raft of the Medusa’ (1819)
Géricault, detail of the Raft of the Medusa
Géricault, Parade Before Louis XVIII (1814)
David, detail of The Sabine Women (1799)
Guérin , The Return of Marcus Sextus (1799)
David, The Oath of the Horatii (1784)
Gros, detail of Bonaparte Among the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (1803)
Géricault, The Farriers’s Signboard (1814)
Géricault, Portrait of a Carbinier with Horse (1815)
Géricault, The Charging Chasseur (1812) & The Wounded Cuirassier (1814)
Géricault, The Dying Paris (1816)
Géricault, Study For Paris and Oenone (1816)
Géricault, Couple Embracing (1815-16)
Géricault, Executioner Strangling a Prisoner (1815-16)
Géricault, The Embrace (1815-16)
Géricault, Start of the Race of the Barberi Horses (1817)
Géricault, Satyr Abducting Nymph (1817)
Géricault, Satyr and Nymph (1817)
Géricault, Detail of Parade Before Louis XVIII (1814)
Romero after Dell’Era, Start of the Race (1805)
Géricault, Study after The Expulsion of Heliodorus (1816-17)
Raphael, detail of The Expulsion of Heliodorus (1511-12)
Géricault, Mameluke Unhorsed by a Charge of Grenadiers (1818)
Géricault, Cavalry Battle (1818)
Géricault, Figures Surrounding an Injured Man (1816-17)
Géricault, Figure Study (Death of Hector) (1817)
Géricault, Leda and the Swan (1816-17)
Géricault, Return From Russia (1818)
Géricault, Wounded Soldiers in a Cart (1818)
Géricault, Study for Wounded Soldiers in a Cart (1818)
Géricault, Rescue of the Survivors (1818)
Géricault, detail of the Raft of the Medusa (1819)
Guérin, detail of Aurora and Cephalus (1810)
David, Death of Bara (1794)
Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Belley (1797)
Géricault, oil study for the Raft of the Medusa (1819)
Cover
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Introduction
In November 1817, the twenty-six year old French artist, Théodore Géricault returned to
Paris after spending a year studying in Italy. He brought back with him seventy-five
preparatory studies toward an ambitious thirty-foot oil painting for the Salon. The
studies depicted the annual Roman carnival event of wild Barbery horses, with their
struggling grooms, racing down the main thoroughfare of the Via del Corso.
Géricault, Start of the Barberi Race (1817).
However, after some deliberation Géricault decided to abandon this subject. Restlessly
searching for an idea to reinvigorate a career that had not seen a Salon appearance in
four years, Géricault contemplated a number of topical stories drawn from his reading of
Paris newspapers. He initially conceived a Salon painting based on the report of a
macabre murder. The victim, Fualdès was a Magistrate of liberal persuasion, who had
been murdered in a brothel. The story came with bizarre overtones of transvestism,
pig’s blood and Ultra-Royalist intrigue. Géricault completed a number of studies of the
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murder but abandoned the project when he sighted popular prints of the event and
believed them to be superior to his own drawings.
Géricault, Fualdès’ body thrown into water (1818).
In February 1818, the story of the 1816 shipwreck of the frigate Medusa resurfaced in
the French press following the November 1817 publication of Naufrage de la frigate la
Méduse, a book by two survivors of the tragedy, naval engineer Corread and the ship’s
doctor, Savigny. Like the Fualdès murder, the Medusa shipwreck came with some
gruesome details, which included cannibalism and injured people thrown overboard.
The Medusa shipwreck was also linked to Ultra-Royalist Émigré interests. The wreck
itself and the circumstances that surrounded its reporting had created a political
controversy. Indeed within broader Restoration history, the political scandal that was
generated by the wreck of the Medusa initiated the downfall of the Ultra-Royalist
ministry. The sweeping liberalisation of government reached an eventual high-point that
coincided with the Raft of the Medusa’s Salon exhibition, in September 1819.
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When Géricault initially conceived his painting in February 1818, the Medusa shipwreck
was 17 months old. Rather than see the event as an unfortunate tragedy, I suggest
Géricault grasped the enormity of the event within the increasing efficacy of liberal
politics at this time. Over the following period of eighteen months he produced an
enormous body of work that recreated scenes of the shipwreck narrative. Géricault met
with raft survivors Corread and Savigny, using both men as models for his painting. He
engaged the maker of the original raft, the ship’s carpenter Lavalette, to construct a
scale model, which he used to place his figures. Géricault also included himself and an
intimate group of friends to pose as raft survivors, along with several professional
models.1
Detail of Six Studies for Corréad and Savigny in the ‘Raft of the Medusa’ (1819).
The scholarship in this thesis on the Raft of the Medusa draws primarily from three
groups: direct art historical investigation of Géricault’s work; scholarship that addresses
the self as a cultural construction; and research which focuses on the specific history of
1
Clement, C. (1879). Géricault, étude biographique et critique. (3rd Edition) Paris : Didier & Co.
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the period. Since the Raft of the Medusa’s Salon exhibition nearly two hundred years
ago, a vast array of written material has examined the painting. This first group of
scholarship generally interprets the Raft of Medusa in either of two distinct ways: one of
which argues that Géricault was a liberal and that the Raft of the Medusa was intended
as a criticism of the conservative Restoration,
2
or the other that Géricault was a
Romantic artist who was ultimately above the politics of the day and that his painting
was one of man challenged by nature.3 While this scholarship has informed my
interpretation, instead of providing arguments for how Géricault fulfilled either of these
positions I have put this whole approach to one side. In its place I examine Géricault and
his work within the emergent cultural construction of the citizen-self.
The rights and responsibilities of the French citizen under Napoleonic and Restoration
history, a pressing concern of the day, produced complex iconography in contemporary
French art. Géricault’s mentors, the French Neo-Classicists, had figured the citizen as a
faultless male of perfect proportion in their painting, and assumed the male figure’s
personal self was seamlessly united with the liberated nation. Thus the ideal of liberty
was tied to that of sacrifice for the nation, which the Neo-Classicists had figured in
painting as the wounded male. 4 The Neo-Classical male form, both ideal and wounded,
had thereby blended private and public space through a civic narrative of liberty and
Empire.
The motif of the wounded male occupies a definitive, central position in Géricault’s
work. However unlike the Neo-Classicists, Géricault’s interpretation of the motif, like
2
Berger, K. (1955). Géricault and his Work. pp. 15- 19. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
Eitner, L. (1983). Géricault His Life and Work. pp. 191-197. London: Orbis Publishing.
4
Crow, T. (2006). Emulations David, Drouais, and Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France (Revised ed.), p.145-188. New Haven &
London: Yale University Press.
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that of his role as citizen, is decidedly more ambiguous. In Géricault’s work after 1815
the wounded male appears to simultaneously move towards both subjective and
objective aspects of the citizen-self. For example, the space that the wounded males in
the Raft of the Medusa occupy appears to be both intensely private but also not without
external obligation: it is uncertain whether the male figures’ private emotions hinder or
galvanise them towards their civic obligation. The protagonists seem to exert a defiant
resistance to the role of citizenship whilst concurrently undertaking a heroic struggle for
recognition. Eroticism and civic obligation struggle with each other for domination,
mirroring much of Géricault’s turbulent life. Interestingly, the conventional
interpretations of Géricault as political partisan and Romantic artist situate his
identification with the role of citizenship at contrasting ends of commitment.
Géricault, detail of the Raft of the Medusa (1819).
Consequently, the second group of scholarship that has informed my understanding of
Géricault’s work is the cultural history that addresses the self, specifically the citizen as a
cultural construction. The investigations of Michel Foucault, Thomas Laqueur and
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Charles Taylor have made substantial contributions to understanding the cultural
constructions of the self after the advent of the Enlightenment.5
According to Lacquer, in ‘the pre-modern world, broadly speaking what is right and good
is to be sought in a providential order, in the authority of the religion, in the authority of
the state, and more generally in one’s relationship to a metaphysical reality beyond
oneself.’ By contrast, the modern period ‘prizes autonomy; it gives an important place to
self-exploration; . . . and its visions of the good life generally involve personal
commitment.’ As Laqueur writes,
This is the age that invented the notion of morality as self-governance; it
insisted that all humans shared a common moral capacity and the specific
psychological capacities that we needed to exercise our freedom. In these
years, a profoundly individualist culture came into being. . .
Although the idea of a ‘modern self’ is, as Laqueur writes, ‘wildly contested’, notions of
inner discipline inherent in the post-Enlightenment construction of the self make
‘individualism’ and ‘liberty’ possible. Foucault, perhaps more than any other scholar,
understood the limitations of this new ‘individualism’ and that ‘liberty’ for the French
citizen now entailed the imprisonment of desire. Like Laqueur and Taylor, Foucault
argues that post-Enlightenment discourses of truth were no longer morally decided by a
higher right and wrong as in pre-modern times, but were instead dictated through
socially constructed norms, such as natural order, rational rule and personal rights.6
These norms exerted power in a manner that was quite unlike previous eras, as they
5
Foucault, E. (1991). The Foucault Reader. Rabinow, P. (Ed.) London: Penguin Books.
Laqueur,T.W. (2003). Solitary Sex A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone Books.
Taylor, C. (1994). Sources of the Self The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6
Here I utilise a summary of Foucault’s ideas by White, M. (2002). Addressing Personal Failure. The International Journal of Narrative
Therapy and Community Work 2002 No.3, 33-75. See also White, M. (2007). Maps of Narrative Practice, p.25, pp.102-3 and p.268-9.
New York: W.M. Norton & Company,Inc.
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obliged the individual citizen to constantly monitor themselves and others within this
framework.
Foucault’s point was that it was not the newly created institutions or their explicit laws
that oppressed the individual but that the newly created citizen now carried within him
invisible pervasive expectations of normality. The individual freedoms of the
Enlightenment necessitated the ongoing normalisation of the citizen-self to maintain
order and it was this phenomenon, argued Foucault that characterised modern power.
I have specifically utilised Foucault’s theories of modern power exerted through
normative judgement to interpret Géricault’s life and work for two reasons. Firstly,
Géricault lived at the cusp of this shift in definition, at a time when Enlightenment values
were beginning to be broadly actualised within French society.7 Secondly, I believe
normative constructions of the self, a by-product of Enlightenment values, exerted
varying levels of influence on Géricault. As a French male the new normative obligations
of citizenship appear to have both constricted and propelled Géricault’s life and work.
His avoidance of conscription, the most defining practical outcome of the invention of
the citizen, points towards a direct reluctance by him to fulfil the role of citizen. The
wounded male, once a potent, explicitly patriotic symbol of civic obligation within the
work of the Neo-Classicists, became for Géricault an ambiguous motif that appeared to
flout these very same obligations within an environment of extreme personal emotion.
7
Foucault, M. (1991). op. cit., Part 1 : Truth and Method, What is Enlightenment? pp. 32-50.
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These are briefly the ideas I borrow to construct what I believe is the significance of the
wounded male in the development of Géricault’s work. However to substantiate the
relevance of these investigations I have also drawn on a third group of scholars whose
research addresses the specific history of the period, including Jack R. Censer and Lyn
Hunt, Andre Jardin and Andre-Jean Tudesq, Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, Phillip
Mansel and Jean Lucas-Debreton. Of these Mansel, de Bertier de Sauvigny, Jardin and
Tudesq have been especially important. 8
A host of commentaries were published on Géricault and the Raft of the Medusa in the
nineteenth-century. However, of these only three studies involved direct consultation
with those who knew the artist. Louis Batissier’s Vie de Géricault was the first study on
the artist published in 1841.9 This forty-eight page document, although brief, addressed
Géricault’s life and work including the Raft of the Medusa in some detail. Batissier
concluded that a premature loss to French Art had occurred with Géricault’s early death
in 1824 at the age of thirty-two.
The second major study of similar size, although often overlooked, is by Charles Blanc.
Blanc devoted a lengthy, insightful chapter to Géricault in his 1845 publication on French
Art, Histoire Des Peintres Français Au Dix-Neuvième Siècle.10 Blanc offered a less
Romantic view of Géricault than Batissier and saw the Raft of the Medusa within the
legacy of Davidian French Neo-Classicism. Blanc asserted that Géricault’s genius was, like
8
Censer, J.R. & Hunt, L. (2001). Liberty, Equality, Fraternity Exploring The French Revolution. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State
University Press.
Jardin, A., & Tudesq, A. (1983). Restoration and Reaction 1815-1848. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press.
De Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966). The Bourbon Restoration. Philadelphia : Univversity of Pennsylvania Press.
Mansel, P. (1981). Louis XVIII. London : Blond & Briggs.
9
Batissier, L. (1841). Vie De Géricault, La Revue du dix- neuvième Siècle, pp. 1-24. Reprinted in Courthion, P. (Ed.) (1947). Géricault
RacontéPar Lui-Même Et Par Ses Amis, pp. 23-70. Geneva : Pierre Cailler.
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Blanc, C. (1845). Histoire Des Peintres Français Au Dix-Neuvièmè Siècle, Géricault, pp. 405-43. Paris: Cauville-Frères.
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that of his Neo-Classical mentors, in his ability to create poetry ‘by raising a huge vulgar
disaster to the heroic proportions of The Odyssey.’11
The third study, a substantial monograph by Charles Clement, Géricault, etude
biograhique et critique, first published in 1867 and enlarged in 1879 in the work’s third
edition, is the most significant of the three studies. Clement’s work incorporates and
develops much of Batissier’s earlier research by freely quoting the 1841 biography. In
addition Clement sought out the last of Géricault’s surviving colleagues, studio assistants
Monfort and Jamar, to construct in further detail the artist’s life. Clement’s lengthy
study of Géricault drew attention to the artist’s contribution to the development of
realism. All three of these primary studies emphasised the humanitarian aspects of the
Raft of the Medusa and interpreted the painting within the realm of nineteenth-century
Romanticism.
French historian Jules Michelet made the first overt political interpretation of the Raft of
the Medusa in a series of planned but never delivered lectures for the Collège de France
in 1848,12 where he writes of the painting:
In 1822 Géricault paints his raft and the shipwreck of France. He is alone, he
steers his own barque, striving towards the future without asking advice or
help from the reaction. That is heroic.
It was France herself, it was our whole society that he placed upon the raft of
the Medusa; a portrait so cruelly true that the original refused to recognise
herself.13
11
ibid., p. 437.
Michelet, J.’s lecture on Géricault was first published in Chesneau, E. (1864). Les Chefs d’école. Appendix, pp. 393-98.
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Translated text and background to Michelet’s lecture provided by Klingender, F.D. (1942). Géricault As Seen In 1848. The
Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 82, No. 475, pp. 254-56.
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Michelet’s interpretation, which sees the inclined raft in Géricault’s painting as France
floundering on reactionary Restoration, would become a highly influential point of view
for many twentieth-century scholars.
While Michelet is correct in interpreting the Raft of the Medusa beyond the narrow
confines of a shipwreck, his interpretation is flawed, just as the date he gives for the
painting is wrong. With indiscriminate urgency, Michelet makes the error of inserting the
Raft of the Medusa into the reactionary Restoration period of 1822. The radical content
in Michelet’s 1848 lectures had been motivated by his anxiety over the July Monarchy’s
growing conservatism and the clergy’s increased influence at the Collège de France. His
own teaching position was jeopardised and Michelet felt his lectures needed to galvanise
action against conservative reaction. The specific difference of three years is of
enormous importance to the interpretation of the Raft of the Medusa within Restoration
history. Importantly the painting was created before the death of the Duc de Berry in
February 1820, the ‘dividing line’ in Restoration history. The Duc’s assassination led to
the implosion of the reconciliatory ‘third force’ in Restoration politics and gave
momentum to the dormant forces of radical liberalism in French Society.14
My position, outlined in detail in Chapter 1, is that the 1819 painting does in fact have
political implications. I argue that Géricault took the opportunity in his painting, within
the considerable liberal hopes of the early Restoration, to reflect upon the two previous
tragic decades of French military history whilst citing the new possibilities provided by
democratic reform.
14
De Bertier de Sauvigny, Guillaume. (1966). op. cit. p. 167.
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In the mid-twentieth century two scholars, Klaus Berger and Lorenz Eitner represented
the two extremes of a growing debate regarding Géricault’s painting. Though Berger had
set aside Michelet’s interpretation as too literal, he nevertheless suggested that
Géricault had fallen under the influence of his Bonapartist associates, Horace Vernet and
Louis Bro, and was motivated to paint the Raft of the Medusa as a criticism of the
restrictive measures of the Restoration government.15 Berger’s political viewpoint
affirmed Leon Rosenthal’s earlier 1905 study, Géricault, which argues that, ‘Whoever let
the Medusa stir him to sympathy, indirectly brought the government of Louis XVIII in to
disrepute.’
16
These radical views were extremely sympathetic to Berger, himself a
German Marxist art scholar who held enormous liberal admiration for Napoleon and
interpreted Géricault’s painting within those heroic views.17 Berger was amongst several
1950’s Marxists including the French Communists Pierre Gaudibert and former Surrealist
Louis Aragon, who interpreted Géricault’s painting within their own radical political
views.18
In 1953, the same year that Berger’s book was published in Vienna, Eitner had published
his 1952 doctoral thesis on the life and work of Géricault. The following year Eitner went
on to challenge primary aspects of Berger’s Marxist interpretation and also the
authenticity of Retreat from Russia, a painting attributed to Géricault.19 Eitner later
15
Berger, K., op. cit., p. 15.
Rosenthal, L. (1905). Géricault, p. 97. Paris: F. Rieder & Co.
17
Berger, K., op. cit., pp. 15-25.
18
Gaudibert, P. (1954). Géricault. Europe, no. 106, (Oct. 1954). pp. 74-100. Aragon, L. published two brief articles on Géricault:
Géricault et Delacroix ou le réel et l’imaginaire. Les Lettres françaises, no. 500. Jan. 21-8, 1954. p. 1. ; Sur Géricault. France novella,
no. 713. (1956) pp. 30-31; and one long historical novel which features the artist fictionalised within the narrative; La Semaine Sainte
(1958). Paris: Gallimard.
19
Eitner,L. (1954). Art Bulletin, Letters to editor. (June 1954). pp. 167-69. The piece titled Retreat from Russia plate 16 in Berger’s
Géricault His Life and Work has since disappeared from Géricault’s oeuvre.
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published two books on Géricault, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in 1972 and Géricault
His Life and Work in 1983. Although both books provided substantial biographical and
historical detail to Géricault’s life and work, they minimised any political importance of
the Raft of Medusa. Eitner steadfastly held to the nineteenth-century reading that the
Raft of the Medusa was essentially a Romantic painting of man challenged by nature,20 a
reading that he sustained through being a dominating authority on Géricault, organising
major travelling retrospectives of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in
1972 and at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco in 1989.
During this period, French scholars such as Germain Bazin,21 Philippe Grunchec
the English academic Anita Brookner
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22
and
would echo Eitner’s Romantic perspective,
accepting that while Géricault was not a supporter of the Restoration government, the
Raft of the Medusa was ultimately a Romantic painting that depicted man challenged by
the elements. Within broader art historical perspectives, scholars such as William
Vaughan
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and Robert Rosenblum
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would recognise some political aspects of the
painting but nevertheless interpreted the painting as an epic metaphor for human
suffering.
Berger galvanised much of his liberal argument for the Raft of the Medusa by equating
abolitionist liberalism with the three African figures on the raft. Berger saw their
20
Eitner, L. (1972). Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, pp. 51-56. London: Phaidon Press. Eitner (1983), op. cit., page 193-7.
Bazin, G. (1994). Théodore Géricault. Etude critique, documents et catalogue raisonné, Vol. 6, pp.7-164. Paris: Wildenstein Institute.
22
Grunchec, P. (1985). Géricault’s Horses., p. 10. London: Sotheby’s Publications.
23
Brookner, A. (1998). Soundings. In Géricault. pp. 4-17. London: Harvill Press.
24
Charlton,D.G. (Ed.). (1984). The French Romantics Vol. 2. In Vaughan, W. Chap. 9, The Visual Arts pp. 330-31. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
25
Rosenblum, R. & Janson, H.W. (1984). Art of the Nineteenth Century. In Rosenblum, R. Part II: 1815-1848, page 120-121. Great
Britain: Thames and Hudson.
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prominent presence as a call for reform.26 Such abolitionist sentiments had been
suggested in the Raft of the Medusa by Charles Blanc’s 1845 study, which drew
attention to the African figure being no longer cargo in the ship’s hold but a heroic figure
at the apex of the raft.
27
However Berger’s pro-Napoleonic interpretation and
Bonapartism in general sits uneasily with abolition, as Napoleon for economic
advantage, had reintroduced slavery in 1802. The abolitionist interpretation would later
be addressed by Hugh Honour and Albert Alhadeff.28 Alhadeff’s tended to reduce the
Raft of the Medusa to a nineteenth-century morality set piece and closed the door on
the painting’s wider significance. In 2007, French scholar Bruno Chenique built upon the
scholarship of Blanc, Michelet, Berger and Honour to assert that the artist was a far-left
radical Liberal. The Raft of the Medusa’s triangular arrangement of figures, argued
Chenique, was covert Freemasonry iconography that advocated fraternity through racial
crossbreeding. Though no direct evidence exists for Géricault’s allegiance to this secret
organisation, the artist’s friends and raft survivors, Corréad and Savigny are cited as
proof, being registered members.29
Recent scholarship has also introduced Géricault’s sexuality into the interpretation of his
art. In 1956, in the French homophile magazine Arcadie, Pierre Nedra had claimed
Géricault was homosexual.30 Later in 1986, Edward Lucie Smith further argued the case,
regardless of Géricault’s well known heterosexual liaisons, that the homoeroticism of
26
Berger, K. op.cit., p.27.
Blanc, C. op. cit., p. p.421.
28
Honour, H. (1989). The Image of the Black in Western Art 4 From the American Revolution to World War. Part 1, pp. 119-126.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Alhadeff, Albert. (2002). The Raft of the Medusa Géricault, Art, and Race, p.185. New York: Prestal.
29
Chenique, B. (2007). The “Raft of the Medusa”, or: The Future of the World. FMR, No. 20, 1-41.
30
Nedra, P. (1956). Géricault et ses amis. Arcadie No 35, Nov. 1956, 31-40.
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the artist’s works speaks for itself.31 Recently, James Smalls in his 2008 book Gay Art
continues with this line of thinking.32
The scholarship on Géricault and the Raft of the Medusa that I have thus far addressed
has generally consisted of interpretations that have aligned the artist to the writers’ own
disposition. A different approach has emerged in the last two decades with the advent
of new cultural history, which discusses Géricault in the light of gender, sexuality and
cultural theory.33 This new approach was first evident in the 1991 catalogue Géricault by
Régis Michel, Sylvain Laveissiére and Bruno Chenique,
34
which accompanied the
substantial survey of Géricault’s work held at the Grand Palais, Paris in 1991-92. The
catalogue renewed the image of the artist as a politically engaged individual. It implicitly
challenged Eitner’s dominant view by questioning his primary historical source, Charles
Clement, and reviving Michelet’s reading,35 highlighting the artist’s social conscience and
drawing attention to the explicit eroticism contained in his work. The approach was less
simplistic than Berger’s Bonapartist interpretation and paved the way for new
possibilities in Géricault scholarship.
The 1996 two volume publication of Géricault Louvre conférences et colloquies, edited
by Régis Michel, was a consequence of this new approach.36 The two volumes included
numerous contributions from European and American scholars including Linda
31
Smith, E.S. (1987). The Homosexual Sensibilty of Géricault’s Paintings and Drawings. European Gay Review, 2, 32-40.
Smalls, J. (2008). Gay Art., p.167. New York: Parkstone Press.
33
For the advent of cultural history in general see Hunt, L. (1989). The New Cultural History. Hunt, L. Introduction, pp. 5-18. Berkley:
University California Press. For analysis of this phenomenon in art history see Eisenman, S. (Ed.). (1994). Nineteenth Century Art, In
Eisenman, S. Introduction, pp. 7-14. London: Thames and Hudson.
34
Michel, R. and Lavissière, S. (Eds.). (1991). Géricault. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux.
35
Michel, R. ibid., pp. XI-XVI.
36
Michel, R. (1996). Géricault. Louvre conférences et colloques, 2 Vols. Paris : La Documentation francaise.
32
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Nochlin,37 Thomas Crow, Stefan Germer,38 Micheal Fried39and Patricia Marinaldi.40 They
offered new arguments that reinterpreted Géricault within the culture of broader
society.
Nochlin’s essay, which initially expressed disapproval of Géricault’s exclusion of women
in the Raft of the Medusa, concludes with praise, asserting that the artist reflected a
homo-social honesty in relation to his immediate social environment. Marinardi’s sociopolitical study posited that the seemingly non-political Romantic image of Géricault’s
later work, Mazeppa (1820-23), was in fact a potent liberal image of a generation’s
disenfranchisement. Marinardi argued the image of Mazzepa, a young man punished for
adultery by being tied naked on his back to a horse, articulated the frustration and lack
of opportunities for young men due to widened restrictions in civic law. Germer’s
analysis of the erotic in Géricault’s work focused on the idea that the artist’s obsession
with sex was driven by an urge to return to the source of his origins. Fried makes an
intriguing argument that the Raft of the Medusa is a continuation of Enlightenment
values and assesses the painting within the anti-theatrical theories of Diderot.
In 1995, Thomas Crow published Emulations, 41 which contained a final chapter devoted
to Géricault titled Coda, a substantial reworking of his earlier contribution in Géricault
Louvre conferences et colloquies.42 Crow’s point of departure was the development of
37
Nochlin, L’s (1994)., Géricault or the Absence of Woman. October 68, Spring 1994, pp. 403-18 republished in ibid. pp403-18.
Germer, S. (1996). On the Origin of Géricault’s Fantasy of Origins. In Michel, R. (Ed.) Géricault. Louvre conférences et colloques, II,
pp. 423- 48.
39
Fried, M. (1996). Géricault’s Romanticism. In ibid, pp. 641-60.
40
Marinaldi, P. (1996).Husbands, Wives and Lovers. In ibid, pp. 272-88.
41
Crow, T. (1995). Emulations Making Painters for Revolutionary France. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
42
Crow, T. (1996). Géricault: The Single Heroic figure, in Michel,R. ibid. pp. 41-58.
38
21
French Neo-Classicism and the single male figure in academic study.43 Géricault is
characterised and assessed by Crow as the ‘late comer’ alongside the earlier French
Neo-Classicists.
Analysis of the artist’s work and intentions continued with Géricault The Alien Body:
Tradition in Chaos, a catalogue for a major exhibition of the artist’s works on paper at
the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (University of British Columbia) in 1997. It
contained a number of significant reinterpretations of the Raft of the Medusa. Of
particular note is Maureen Ryan’s essay, which examines the complexity of responses by
the contemporaneous press to the Raft of the Medusa.44 Ryan argued that the painting’s
confused reception was due in large part to the number of anxieties it raised regarding
race and pictorial hierarchy. Her argument about race and pictorial hierarchy was
extended in 2002 by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, in her book Extremities, who offers a postcolonial re-reading of the Raft of the Medusa through a broad cultural interpretation of
cannibalism.45
The past two decades of scholarship on Géricault cited provide the models for this
thesis. Using the work of Taylor, Foucault and Laqueur, as well as recent revisions of
Napoleonic history
46
and also an analysis of the popular moderate liberalism of the
period known as the ‘third force’, I argue that Géricault’s work subjectively remodelled
the cultural construction of the citizen-self.
43
Crow, T. (1995). Coda in op. cit. pp. 279-99.
Ryan, M. (1997). Liberal Ironies, Colonial Narratives, and the Rhetoric of Art: Reconsidering Géricault’s Radeau de la Méduse and
the Traite des Négres. In Guilbaut, S., Ryan, M. & Watson, S. (Eds.), Théodore Géricault The Alien Body: Tradition in Chaos, pp. 18-51.
Vancouver: University of British Columbia.
45
Grigsby, D.G. (2002). Extremities., Ch. 4 Cannibalism, pp. 165-235. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
46
Tulard, J. (1985). Napoleon The Myth of the Saviour. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., Lyons, M. (1994). Napoleon Bonaparte and the
Legacy of the French Revolution. New York: St. Martin’s Press., Dywer, P.G. (Ed.) (2001). Napoleon and Europe. Great Britain: Pearson
Education Ltd.
44
22
As if searching for missing pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, such scholars as Berger sought to
fill in aspects of Géricault’s personality by citing the patriotic and radical affiliations of
his associates.47 I will construct an argument that the missing pieces of the Géricault
puzzle are actually present, but that their recognition can only be translated as an
absence within the normative obligations of nineteenth-century French history. Though
Géricault took an active interest in politics and was sympathetic to liberal causes, he was
far from the perfect citizen. Like his mentor Gros, who committed suicide because of his
own feelings of failure, Géricault struggled within the new framework of expectations
that the citizen embodied and engaged in activities of dramatic alienation, and indeed
self-harm, to continually rewrite himself within a subjective heroic context. This only
removed Géricault further from possible identification with the citizen. Failure, selfharm, irresponsible behaviour, excessive intimacy and what Géricault called ‘the gift of
misfortune’ are non-pieces of a puzzle that were not only self-destructive but also
profoundly attractive to Géricault because they provided depth to the normalising
flatness of nineteenth-century life that citizenship entailed.
Michelet in 1848 had suggested that Géricault failed to harness his creativity because he
departed from the inspired normative values of citizenship: ‘This was his grave fault,’ he
writes, ‘He did not have faith in the eternity of his country . . . he should have made his
life broader and bigger; instead of remaining on the cold, colourless surface of high
47
Albert Boime, a writer who has never been reserved in the political interpretation of an artwork has recently observed that the
radicalism of Géricault’s associates is overstated. See Boime, A. (2004). Art in the Age of the Counterrevolution. p.125 and p. 663,
f.n.46. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Here I cite Boime’s criticism of Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, N.M. (1986), Imago
Belli: Horace Vernet’s L’Atelier as an image of Radical Militarism under the Restoration, Art Bulletin 68, pp.268-280.
23
society.’ Michelet believed Géricault lacked ‘the profound passion of patriotism.’ 48 That
Géricault might have found this course of dramatic alienation a profound source of
creativity is not recognised as a justification by Michelet. In chapter 2 I demonstrate
otherwise, showing how Géricault’s wounded male from 1814 to 1819 is freed after the
Empire’s fall from the Neo-Classical patriotic subject into a rich repository of suppressed
emotions and unrealised ambitions. The final chapter develops the argument utilising
Géricault’s immediate personal context that the motif of the wounded male existed in
the Raft of the Medusa as a form of strained adherence and profound resistance to the
nineteenth-century normative values of the penultimate cultural construction of the
self, the citizen.
48
Klingender, F.D. (1942). op. cit. p. 256.
24
1
The Raft of the Medusa (1819) within the context of the early French Restoration.
The frequent interpretation of the Raft of the Medusa as a political commentary on the
conservative Restoration government (1814-1830) is not easily dismissed. After all,
Géricault had as mentors a generation of Neo-Classical artists who, as propagandists for
the revolution and then Napoleon, had created explicit allegories glorifying their times.
To be fully convincing however, such interpretation requires a close examination of the
rapidly changing events of this period. Too generalised accounts of this Restoration
period in French history have led art historians to conclude that Géricault intended to
make a veiled criticism of the Restoration government when, as I will argue, the
opposite is more likely the case.
First, Géricault created the Raft of the Medusa in the hope of a state purchase, so it is
unlikely that he would deliberately seek to criticise the government. Second, over the
course of the two years that Géricault worked on the Raft of the Medusa, in 1818 and
1819, early Restoration France was experiencing a period of liberal reform that began in
1816 and had extended to 1820. Thus, the immediate political and historical context of
the Raft of the Medusa was not oppressive but a period of liberal experiment charged
with possibility.
By 1814, after a quarter of a century of war under the leadership of Napoleon, France
had become increasingly, according to Robert Tombs, ‘sullen, mutinous and
25
exhausted.’49 These characteristics were especially applicable to the generation born in
the last decade of the eighteenth century. This younger generation, to which Géricault
belonged, had fought and toiled under Napoleon. However Géricault’s generation had
not derived any great benefits from the wealth created by the Empire. The main
beneficiaries of the Revolution and Empire where those of an older middle class who
remained powerful through the civil equality, office and wealth they had gained since
1789.50 Géricault’s rich and initially supportive relatives, the Caruels, were one
contingent of this class who had reaped substantial financial reward during Napoleon’s
reign through land acquisition and tobacco growing.51
I contend that Géricault, like many of his generation, welcomed the demise of Napoleon.
Tombs writes that after the French defeat in Germany in 1814,
what most French people wanted was peace . . . Thousands of deserters were
on the run, living often as brigands, and conscripts had to be dragged to
barracks roped together. Inflation, heavy taxation, requisitions and the British
naval blockade caused economic devastation. The last three years of the war
had been particularly hard, with serious food shortages and unemployment,
with long term damage to children...the fall of Napoleon was therefore greeted
with relief.52
In April 1814 peace was negotiated without the Emperor’s consent by Napoleon’s
former foreign minister Talleyrand, who suggested the return to power of the archaic
royal family, the Bourbons. The allies were surprised by how the people of France rallied
to the cause of the old Bourbons solely because they advocated peace and the end of
49
Tombs, R. (1996). France 1814-1914, p.330. London & New York: Longman.
Tomes, R. (1996). ibid. pp. 330-333.
51
Eitner, L. (1983). op. cit. p. 13.
52
Tombs, R. (1996). op. cit. p. 330.
50
26
conscription.53 Following the anti-war spirit of his time, Géricault demonstrated an
allegiance to Louis XVIII’s return in May 1814 in his contemporary studies celebrating
that event, Parade before Louis XVIII and Parade before Louis XVIII and other sketches.
Géricault lent further support to the Bourbons by enlisting in early June 1814 with the
royalist regiment, The Grey Musketeers.
Géricault, Parade Before Louis XVIII (1814).
This interpretation goes against the grain of conventional art history. For many art
historians such as Klaus Berger, who casts a more radical slant to Géricault’s character,
his enlisting is excused as ‘youthful impulsiveness.54 Lorenz Eitner, who argues for a
more neutral political role for Géricault, suggested that he joined The Grey Musketeers
for romantic reasons, to impress his future mistress Alexandrine-Modeste.55
53
54
55
Tombs, R. (1996). ibid.
Berger, K. (1955). op. cit .p. 12.
Eitner, L. (1983). op. cit. p. 74.
27
Berger and Eitner owe their ideas about Géricault enlisting in The Grey Musketeers to
his most significant nineteenth-century biographer Charles Clement, who writes, ‘For
him it was merely a lark, a means of escaping from studio tedium into a life of action.’56
Clement had written Géricault’s biography in 1868, forty-four years after the artist’s
death and at the height of the growth of the Napoleonic legend in France. 57 The main
contributor to this book was Géricault’s young Bonapartist friend, Antoine Monfort. At
the time Clement consulted Monfort he was sixty-six years old and full of nostalgic
memories of the military Empire. However because Monfort was only a young boy
during the period of Empire, he unlike Géricault, had no direct experience of
conscription or war. Clement’s explanation of Géricault’s enlistment into the Royalist
Grey Musketeers, sourced from Bonatartist Monfort, sought to minimise what appeared
to be an unpatriotic gesture by emphasising Géricault’s adventurous spirit. This is,
however, hardly a reliable appraisal of Géricault’s motives at the time.
The reluctance to join Napoleon’s war machine had reached tragic heights in the final
term of the Empire. Stanislas de Girardin, Prefect to the Seine-Inférieure, states that
young men;
had their teeth pulled out in order to avoid serving. Others have managed to
make them almost decay by the use of acids, or by chewing incense. Some
have produced sores on their arms and legs by blistering themselves, and to
make these sores, so to speak, incurable, they dressed them with water and
arsenic. Many have given themselves hernias and some apply violent acids to
their genitals.58
56
57
58
Clement, C. (1879). , op. cit.. quoted in Grunchec, P. (1985). , op. cit. p. 7.
For a detailed description of Napoleon’s legend see Tulard, J. (1985). op. cit. pp. 344-49.
Tulard, J. (1985). op. cit. p. 319.
28
Much more compelling reasons existed for Géricault to enlist with The Grey Musketeers
than the allure of the uniform.
It has been estimated that by 1814, after several decades of revolution and war, the
death toll of French soldiers had reached 1.5 million.59 When Géricault joined The Grey
Musketeers more than one in three boys born between 1790 and 1795 had been killed
or wounded.60 Although Géricault was born in 1791 and conscripted in 1811, he avoided
military service by allowing his father to pay for a draft replacement.61 This was only a
temporary measure that safeguarded Géricault for the year, as the draft was repeatedly
redrawn in the desperate final years of the Empire between 1812 and 1814.62 By 1814,
when Géricault joined The Grey Musketeers, he had seen more than a third of his
generation killed or maimed. Louis XVIII’s promised democratic platform contained a
commitment to end both war and conscription.
Géricault’s enlisting in The Grey
Musketeers can be viewed accordingly as a gesture motivated by popular anti-war
sentiments of the time. He was not alone here. Other prominent men of his age, all of
whom were of a romantic pacifist nature, including the future liberal politicians Salvandy
and Lamartine and the writer Alfred de Vigny, also enlisted in The Grey Musketeers. 63
Neither was Géricault half-hearted. At the time of Napoleon’s surprise return to power
in March 1815, Géricault was so committed to Louis XVIII that he rode for six days in the
59
Charle, C. (1991). Histoire sociale de la France au XIXe siècle, p. 16 quoted in Tombs, R.(1996). op. cit.. p. 330.
ibid.
61
Eitner, L. (1983). op. cit. p.19 and p.324 f.n. 45.
62
Tulard, J. (1985). op. cit. p. 319.
63
Mansel, P. (1981). op. cit. p. 205. Lamartine was a writer, poet and politician idealist whose support for democracy and pacifism
along with his moderate stance later caused his supporters to desert him. De Vigny too was a writer, poet and novelist who
developed themes of human fraternity. Salvandy initially worked with Decazes in 1816, then actively opposed against the UltraRoyalists in the Villéle government 1822-1828. After the July Monarchy he served on the Chamber of Deputies from 1830 till 1848
and served as Minister of Education from 1837-1839. Salvandy when working for Decazes, possibly leaked the Medusa tragedy to the
press.
60
29
driving rain, escorting him to the Belgian border on the 30 th of March where the King
sought exile in Ghent.64
Géricault’s apparent support for Louis XVIII should not be seen to extend to advocating a
return to inherited monarchical rule, but rather as a commitment to the liberal values
that had been instilled and drafted by Louis XVIII in the Charter of 1814 and enacted on
the 4th June of that year. With the aim of uniting the divisive elements of French society,
the Charter established a parliamentary government similar to the English model whilst
maintaining significant features of the Napoleonic administrative system. Through the
Charter Artz states, ‘Louis XVIII made public acknowledgement that the new society
which had issued from the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” would not be
destroyed.’65 According to Mansel:
Many people who were Royalist in 1815, such as Guizot, Lainé, Maréchal
Gouvion saint-Cyr and the student volunteers from the Ecole de Droit who came
to Ghent, were dedicated liberals who supported Louis for the sake of the liberal
constitution he had granted, rather than out of respect for his dynastic rights –
an impressive testimony to the degree to which the Charter carried conviction in
1815. A large proportion of the educated, urban middle classes had similar
views.66
Napoleon’s return to Paris on 20th March 1815 was disastrous. First it divided the
country. Those who supported him, including principally soldiers, workers and some
peasants, were a vocal minority but the growing power base of the middle classes and
politicians were weary of further casualties and debt.67 Second, Napoleon returned to
64
Eitner, L. (1983). op. cit. p. 75.
Artz, F.B. (1963). France under the Bourbon Restoration, p.13. New York: Russell & Russell. Inc.
66
Mansel, P. (1981). op. cit. p. 233.
67
Tombs, R. (1996). op. cit. p. 334, Jardin and Tudesq (1983). op. cit. p. 18.
65
30
what he did best, war. This he waged at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 th June 1815 only to
suffer a complete defeat that had grievous consequences for France. Napoleon
abdicated power a second time after his defeat on the 22 nd of June. With the reintroduction of Bourbon rule by the Allies on 8 th July came severe penalties. Territories
that bordered France were diminished and French colonies such as the Seychelles were
handed over to the British. The humiliating occupation of France by the Allies did not
end until 30th November 1818, the year that Géricault conceived the Raft of the Medusa.
In recent years there has been a substantial revision of Napoleonic history.68 The cult of
glory has been replaced by a vigorous questioning of the many benefits that Napoleon
contributed to the nation of France. The historian Paul Schroeder notes that Napoleon
was, ‘one of the most remarkable, persuasive and impudent liars in history.’69 Philip
Dwyer and Micheal Sibalis argue that Napoleon’s Empire operated as a strict police
state. 70 Even the Restoration’s more restrictive later years figure as a period of respite
compared to the authoritarian rule of the Empire.
71
I argue that a close reading of the
political developments during the conception of the Raft of the Medusa throws new
light on Géricault’s intentions.
From 22nd August 1815 to 5th September 1816, the returned Restoration government
could be described as a reactionary den of Ultra-Royalists, who introduced a legal white
terror of sackings and imprisonment across France. Louis XVIII, however, was a
moderate and under the advice of the Allies he dissolved parliament on the 5 th
68
Dywer, P.G. (Ed.) (2001). op.cit, Tulard, J. (1985). op. cit. Lyons, M. (1995). op. cit.
Schroeder, P. (1994). The Transformation of European Politics 1763-184, p. 469. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
70
Sibalis, M.. 4. The Napoleonic Police State, pp. 79- 93 and Dwyer,P.G. Introduction, pp. 1-20. Dwyer, P.G. (Ed.) (2001). op. cit.
71
De Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966). op. cit. p. 458, De Bertier de Sauvigny writes the Bourbons had in ‘their fifteen-year rule
procured a salutary respite for France, which even seemed like one of the happiest periods in her history.’
69
31
September 1816. An election was called and using a combination of gerrymandering and
patronage, a government of largely moderate Royalists was returned under Duc de
Richelieu with ‘a policy of “royalizing the nation and of nationalizing the monarchy.”’72
The Raft of the Medusa was conceived and painted between the years 1818 to 1819, a
period that falls within the distinctly liberal years of the Restoration beginning in
September 1816 and ending in November 1819. Far from being a stifling period that
characterised the Restoration in general, this brief period is regarded by historians as
The Liberal Experiment.73 The ‘dumpy’ Louis XVIII, as some historians have dismissively
characterised him, was in fact a wily politician in these early years. 74 During this period
the formation of political parties, a modern electoral system and a parliamentary form
of government, the very features associated with a modern democracy, emerged. The
freedom of speech that is explicitly linked with a modern society was here in
formation.75
Though the Duc de Richelieu was prime minister, the real power in this new ministry
increasingly lay with Elie Decazes the King’s favourite. Decazes’ role was to serve as
Minister for Police, but he also acted as confidante to the King, providing him with
guidance on how to quell Ultra-Royalist influences, as well as acting as the King’s
informant. Interpretations of Decazes’ abilities vary widely but there is general
agreement that Louis XVIII utilised Decazes’ then free thinking liberal associations for the
survival of his own government. Under Decazes even the most sceptical liberals were
72
Artz, F.B. (1963). op. cit. p. 18.
De Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966). op. cit. Ch.11 Decazes and the Liberal Experiment pp. 158-178, Mansel, P. (1981). Ch. 14 The
Liberal Years September 1816- February 1820.
74
Hemmings,F.W.J. (1987) . Culture and Society in France., p. 124. Gt. Britain: Leicester University Press
75
Artz (1963). Op.cit. p. 9.
73
32
finally convinced that Louis XVIII did genuinely support and desire a parliamentary,
constitutional Government.76
Louis XVIII’s support of Decazes and his liberal program between 1816 and 1819 should
not be interpreted as a ‘veneer’ of compassionate conservatism as some scholars would
have us believe.77 The survival of the Charter, which entailed securing broad left and
moderate Royalist support, was central to Louis XVIII and Decazes’ political commitment.
Louis XVIII dissolved the Ultra-Royalist Chambre Introuvable because he believed that the
Ultra-Royalists’ ultimate intention was to weaken his government and to eventually
create a situation where they could tear up the Charter. In dissolving the Chambre
Introuvable Louis XVIII had turned against the influence of his brother and the leader of
the Ultras, the Comte d’ Artois. In June 1817, less than a year after the Chambre
Introuvable was dissolved, the Ultras instigated a plan to assassinate Louis XVIII which
became known as the Riverside Plot.78 This conspiracy, which was quickly discovered and
suppressed by Decazes’ police, clearly demonstrates the ultimately life threatening and
family dividing sacrifice Louis XVIII had made to his belief in the Charter. After the king
had taken the profound step of dissolving the Chambre Introuvable to preserve the
Charter, the left understood the continued existence of the Charter safeguarded France
from Ultra-Royalist dominance. The Charter then grew to be as central to liberal feeling
as it had been to Louis XVIII. As Mansel writes, ‘by 1818 the liberals’ great rallying-cry
was, as it would be until 1830, ‘La Charte, toute la Charte, et rien autre que la Charte’
(‘The Charte, the whole Charte and nothing but the Charte’).’79
76
Mansel, P. (1981). op. cit. p. 364.
Boime, A. (2004). Art in an Age of Counterrevolution, p.146 with attached f.n.65 p. 664. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
78
Lucas-Dubreton, J. (1967). op. cit. p.53.
79
Mansel, P. (1981). op. cit. p. 353 quoting Le Constitutionnel 5.7.1818.
77
33
During the period that Géricault conceived of and completed The Raft of the Medusa,
Decazes’ liberal program involved rallying the ‘third force’ of French politics in the
Chamber of Deputies, which consisted of the constitutional monarchists from the
moderate left and right of politics with the Doctrinaires in the centre, under the
leadership of Royer-Collard. By 1819 this diverse group of statesmen known as the
Constitutionals appeared to be fully realising their liberal vision. This government
distinguished itself by ensuring that any liberal reforms were undertaken in the context
of the stabilisation and continuing survival of France as a democracy.
The Raft of the Medusa directly emulates these parliamentary values. The painting’s
iconography is practical not revolutionary in its outlook. If there is any operating
ideology in the Raft of the Medusa it functions pragmatically as a humanitarian one
based on the necessity of survival. The heroism of Géricault’s raft figures is not
expressed through military accomplishments but through their tenacity and
determination to survive the traumas of being marooned on a raft for two weeks.
Géricault tactically chose a reconciliatory episode for his painting that looks towards the
future in preference to more divisive scenes that had occurred earlier in the narrative,
such as the soldiers’ revolt against the officers or the cutting of the raft’s towing rope.
The ascending figures of the Raft of the Medusa urgently call for recognition, not to
precipitate dissent but to reach for survival after disaster. The painting can be read
accordingly as an allegory of the predicament of France at this time.
34
David, detail of The Sabine Women (1799).
Géricault’s striking mix of classic odyssey and modern tragedy was not a new form of
politicised painting. His Neo-classical mentors had two decades earlier borrowed antique
narratives for their paintings to provide perspectives on the most pressing political
questions of the day.80 For The Sabine Women, painted during the French reconciliatory
period of 1799 David judiciously chose to depict an ancient heroic act of self-sacrifice
that led to the immediate cessation of hostilities between two warring armies.
81
Géricault had simply reversed the formula, taking a contemporary event with timely
political reference and layering the painting with a classic heroic narrative of maritime
endurance reminiscent of The Odyssey.82
An even more compelling connection between Decazes and the Raft of the Medusa is
the direct relationship the minister had to releasing the incriminating details of the
Medusa maritime tragedy to the press. Shortly after the survivors of the Medusa wreck
returned to France in 1816, the Ultra-Royalist Maritime Minister Vicompte Du Bouchage
was informed of the disaster. Hoping to downplay the tragedy and the possibility of
80
81
82
O’Brien, D. (2006). Op.cit. page 18.
Monneret, S. (1999). David and Neo-Classicism, p. 131. Paris: Terrail.
Blanc, C. (1845). op.cit.
35
future scandal he quietly released to the official newspaper Moniteur Universal a small
paragraph that innocuously summarised the shipwreck.
83
This news was published
inconspicuously in the back pages of the Moniteur Universal on the 11th September
1816, with the hope by Du Bouchage that the incident would disappear into the annals
of history. A day later raft survivor, Savigny, independently presented an extended
account of the event that he had personally written to the Maritime Ministry in Paris.
This account, with that of another survivor Corread, would form the basis of their book,
Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal (1817). Savigny’s account pointed the blame for the
disaster at the incompetent Ultra-Royalist émigré, Captain Champernay, and would have
been extremely damaging to the Maritime Minister if it had been released. To Savigny’s
astonishment, the following day his narrative was published in full on September 13 in
the French newspaper Journal des Débats. The second week of September 1816 was a
legal heartache for Savigny, who had to prove to the Maritime Ministry that he was
completely innocent of this extraordinarily damaging leak. He eventually obtained
information from the Journal des Débats that the leak had come from the office of the
Minister of Police, Decazes.84
Decazes’ political scheming at the time was to discredit the Ultra-Royalists and sabotage
their positions in government. He used the Medusa shipwreck to demonstrate the
dangers of granting senior positions of leadership to those of inherited title over those
of experience and merit. The release of this information by Decazes was a tactic that
would eventually bring about the downfall of the Maritime Minister Du Bouchage and
83
McKee, A. (1975). Death Raft, Chap. 11. There’s One Who’ll Never Get To France. pp. 157-70. Great Britain: Souvenir Press. McKee
provides in some detail how the raft of the Medusa scandal was generated.
84
McKee, A. (1975). ibid.
36
his own continued rise in politics. As Savigny and Corread both modelled for the Raft of
the Medusa sometime in 1818 or 1819, there is a strong possibility that one or both of
them shared the details of this intrigue with Géricault.
The liberal debates in the Chambers of the Deputies that so characterised the shifting
platforms of the early Restoration years were, like the account of the Medusa tragedy,
published widely in the newspapers of the day during the period of the Raft of the
Medusa’s creation. There is a resonance between these debates and images of wounded
males grappling on a tipping wooden vessel in the Raft of the Medusa. The raft had been
urgently hammered together by desperate men from the timber beams of the sinking
Medusa as a means of survival. Similarly, under pressure from the allies, the Charter of
1814 was hastily assembled to provide a framework for democratic reform in
parliament.85 During these liberal years parliament was a particularly lively forum where
fundamental principles of government were debated and widely disseminated in the
newspapers of the day.
86
Freed from Napoleon’s authority, politicians were now
heroically engaged in parliamentary debate to transform the nation:
When we go back over the minutes of the parliamentary debates, we are struck
by the earnestness, dignity, and loftiness of mind which prevailed within the
legislative halls. “The Charter,” Thiers affirmed, “had transformed the forum of
the ancients into a hall of decent people.”...Nor did the debates in the chamber
ever have more coverage in the press and a more profound influence on public
opinion-one speech by Royer-Collard had, they say, a million copies reprinted.87
85
86
87
Artz, F.B. (1963). op. cit. pp. 38- 40.
Artz, F.B. (1963). ibid. p. 21.
De Bertier de Sauvigny (1966). op. cit. p. 293.
37
Did Géricault draw inspiration from the lively debates that were extensively reported in
newspapers to configure the wounded male bodies in the Raft of the Medusa?
88
Curiously, although Eitner denies the Raft of the Medusa a more topical reading, he
writes that, ‘While other history painters studied Plutarch and the lives of the saints in
preparation for the coming Salon, Géricault read the newspapers and waited . . .’89
Newspapers proliferated in Paris during the Restoration. 90 There were at least twenty
newspapers in circulation that focused upon politics.91 Of these, the four leading political
newspapers had a total of 50,500 subscriptions.92 Considering the population of Paris in
1818 of 713,000, this subscription figure shows that the press was becoming a powerful
force in society.93 Readership too was much greater than the number of subscribers
because often several people joined together to pay for one subscription and in Paris
there were reading rooms and cafes where, for a modest fee, patrons regularly read
newspapers.94 The national education system had increased literacy levels and
newspapers became an increasingly important form of communication and source of
information for a growing, young educated middle class. Géricault was part of this
cultured and growing young middle class who avidly read newspapers.
Maureen Ryan has argued that the constructed image the French press made of the then
current body politic, especially from the liberal spectrum, was not dissimilar to the image
of Géricault’s protagonists on the Raft of the Medusa.95 In the early years of the
88
Ryan, M. (1997). op. cit.
Eitner, L. (1972). p. 19.
90
O’Brien, D. (2004) .op. cit. p. 171, de Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966). op. cit. 293-94
91
Jardin, A. & Tudesq, A-J. (1983). op.cit. p. 37.
92
Mansel, P. (1981). op. cit. p. 350.
93
De Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966). op. cit. p. 237.
94
ibid.p. 295.
95
Ryan, M (1997). op. cit., p. 29.
89
38
Restoration, the press created, ‘a popular liberal discourse in which the bourgeois French
citizen was posed as the physically embattled member of a violated body politic.’96
France was portrayed by liberal newspapers and journals, such as Le Mercure de France,
La Minerve francaise and the Bibliothéque historique, as a wounded body needing
resuscitation and liberation from the Ultra–Royalists who were scheming to re-enslave
society with a system that was a carbon copy of the past.97 The journalist in La Minerve
francaise wrote in 1818 that, ‘Subjected by all the laws, a slave to all the ministerial rules,
it (the press) has suffered up until the present, a dual censorship from the police and
from foreign affairs.’98 Ironically, this distinct liberal voice of protest had been mute prior
to the Restoration. Newspaper reportage before Napoleon’s abdication in June 1815 was
heavily censored and dissenters were threatened with imprisonment.99 During his reign
there were only four newspapers in circulation and as these were government approved,
their monotonous voice was little more than Empire propaganda.100
Though liberal newspapers complained of stifled debate during the early years of the
Restoration, the published oratory and ever larger voice of criticism illustrated the very
opposite, the presence of free speech. It was not only politicians of the left who saw the
critical voice of a free press as an essential component towards effective and
representative government. As Jardin and Tudesq writes of this specific period, ‘even on
the right, liberalism was not absent. It was represented in the Conservateur during its
brief life span (1818-19) and the Journal des débats. The principles of the parliamentary
96
Ibid. p. 29.
Ryan, M. (1997)., op.cit.
98
Ryan, M. (1997). op. cit. p.47, f.n.30.
99
Sibalis, M. (2001). Chapter 4 The Napoleonic Police State, pp.79-93 and Isser Woloch (2001) Chapter 3 The Napoleonic Regime and
French Society in Napoleon and Europe, pp.60-75 in Dwyer, P.G. (2001) op. cit.
100
O’Brien, D. (2006). op. cit. p.171-3.
97
39
regime…were vigorously supported as early as 1816 by Chateaubriand in La Monarchie
selon la Charte.’101 For Géricault and his cohort, the existence of these lively oppositional
voices was a remarkable new situation without precedent in their lifetime.
Arguably, Géricault’s configuration of the Raft of the Medusa was directly inspired by
this new experience of reading about seemingly unrelated events that were then freely
interpreted and drawn together within the newspaper columns of the day. The Journal
des Débats, the most read newspaper in 1818, with a subscription of 27,000, regularly
published parliamentary debates and was the same newspaper that disclosed the
tragedy of the Medusa.102 Parliamentary proceedings and the circumstances that
surrounded the shipwreck of the Medusa are ostensibly an unlikely pairing of events,
however they both vied for space within the crowded columns of the flourishing
newspapers of the period. These newspapers were the vital conduit of ideas to the
young educated middle class. When the ‘circumstances of the shipwreck of the Medusa
burst like a bombshell upon the public Eitner observes, ‘it was immediately taken up by
the French and foreign press, and brought on a resounding scandal.’103
Though most scholars assume that Géricault became aware of the Medusa tragedy
when he returned to Paris in November 1817 after a year in Italy, the possibility that he
was aware of the tragedy before he left France in 1816 is equally plausible. Géricault
probably departed for Italy after his twenty-fifth birthday, in late September or early
101
102
103
Jardin, A. & Tudesq, A-J. (1983). op. cit. p.80.
De Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966). op. cit. p.143.
Eitner, L. (1983). op. cit. p.163.
40
October 1816.104 The extended narrative of the Medusa shipwreck written by Savigny
was published in the Journal des Débats on the 13th of September 1816, at least two
weeks before Géricault’s departure for Italy. The Journal des Débats was the most
widely read newspaper of the Restoration and prominently devoted three quarters of
available space to this story.105 Considering the topicality of the issues, I suggest
Géricault would have had at least some rudimentary knowledge of this tragic event as
he was packing his bags for Italy. Certainly, while he was in Italy, these events would
have been a likely topic of discussion for his fellow French artists in Rome.
The crux of the argument that Géricault’s painting criticises the Restoration government
assumes that the artist intended to highlight the appointment of an incompetent
Royalist Captain by a then Royalist minister. Certainly, if Géricault knew of the event
before he left for Italy in late September or early October 1816, as I argue is likely, he
would have rightly associated the wreck with government negligence perpetuated by
incompetent Ultra-Royalist ministers. However, several weeks before Géricault left for
Italy, on the 5th of September, Louis XVIII had dissolved the Ultra-Royalist chamber, the
Chambre Introuvable and King Louis XVIII was yet to form a new liberalised ministry and
government. Géricault was in Italy when on the 25 October 1816, the Chamber was
returned with a majority of constitutional monarchists, 238 deputies contained 146
supporters of the ministry with only 92 Ultra-Royalists. In September 1817, five months
before Géricault even conceived of his painting, the captain was discharged and the
minister responsible for his appointment removed. When Géricault returned to Paris in
November, a new liberalised ministry had been formed in response to the Medusa
104
105
Whitney, W. (1997). Géricault In Italy., p.13. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
De Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966)., op. cit. p. 293.
41
disaster and a new chamber, slashed of Ultra-Royalists, with a liberal and moderate
Royalist majority was now sitting in government. Thus, when Géricault began work on
the Raft of the Medusa, the disaster and the subsequent scandal had already been an
effective catalyst for sweeping political change.
The joyful comments in a letter by Géricault in March of 1820 to fellow artist Horace
Vernet upon hearing of Decazes’ fall in February 1820 have been cited as evidence that
he had not been taken in by the minister’s earlier tide of liberal reform.106 Géricault’s
comments were however written in 1820, after the Left and the Left-Centre Doctrinaires
in November 1819 had turned against Decazes following his betrayal to the Ultras.
Before Decazes’ move to the right, the broad liberal cause, including presumably
Géricault if he is to be counted as a liberal, had complete faith in Decazes’ liberal
program. This is demonstrated by Royer-Collard’s gesture of wanting to raise a statue in
1816 in Decazes’ honour.107
Within this overall context the Raft of the Medusa should not be read as a marginalised
comment made from the far left questioning the reactionary program of the Restoration
but an inspired ameliorative tract to rally further the strident liberal direction of the
government. Géricault had transformed the original depressing narrative by altering the
role of the raft survivors from victims who seek compensation to heroes who seek
recognition. The struggling half standing survivors in the Raft of the Medusa are a
precise physical representation of the Restoration as defined by Lucas-Dubreton: ‘The
106
107
Boime, A. (2004). op. cit. p.139, citing Chenique, B. (1996). op. cit. p.62.
De Bertier de Sauvigny,G. (1966). op. cit. p.164.
42
Restoration was a prolonged effort towards reconstructing the nation and setting it once
more on its feet.’108
At this point the reader may question whether Géricault was involved in following the
political events of the day so earnestly, especially from distant Italy. Evidence exists that
next to news of friends, politics was of special importance to the artist. In a letter from
Rome to Dedreux-Dorcy in Paris dated the 27th November 1816 Géricault writes:
my heart is full of memories…How my friends are, what is happening in Paris,
and a bit of politics to boot-that would make a really interesting letter that
would keep me abreast of everything that goes on at a distance.
One of the special features of the Restoration was the intense interest in politics that
the people of Paris embraced. Géricault was not unusual in maintaining this awareness.
Mansel writes in his biography of Louis XVIII that:
politics dominated not only Louis’s life, but also the lives of many of his
subjects – as was to be expected in an age when people’s careers and
fortunes and physical safety could be so affected by political events.
Members of the elite now chose their lovers, their friends, the salons they
went to, the cafés they patronized, the quartiers they lived in (in Paris the
Faubourg Saint-Germain was Ultra, the Faubourg Saint-Honoré moderate
Royalist and the Chausée d’Antin liberal), the flowers they wore in their
button-holes (violets for Bonapartists, lilies for Royalists) and the lines they
applauded in plays, according to their political beliefs. Politics so dominated
people’s lives that men and women who hitherto had talked about little else
but hunting and dancing after 1814 suddenly began to hold forth with great
earnestness on the budget, the circulation of wheat or the best mode of
recruitment for the army.
Between the 3rd and 10th February 1817, the introduction of the Lainé electoral law
allowed men over the age of thirty who paid a direct tax of 300 francs the right to
108
Lucas-Dubreton, J. (1967). op. cit. p. 121.
43
vote.109 This law was introduced by the liberals and was calculated to facilitate the
ascendency of the middle class in future elections.110 On the 10th March 1818, the
Gouvion-Saint-Cyr law was enacted democratising the army and included promotion by
merit.111 In the middle of this political change, in February 1818, Géricault had begun to
conceive of a dramatic painting depicting survivors of the Medusa wreck on a raft. As
the political window of opportunity opened further during this period, Géricault created
an apex of figures urgently beckoning toward possible rescue. These figures, balancing
precariously on a tilting barrel and believing they have at last sighted their rescuers,
reveal a strong sense of unsteady optimism, as if reflecting the high ambitions of the
period.
In November 1818, allied occupation ended with France paying an indemnity. 150,000
allied soldiers left France and in doing so France relinquished the financial responsibility
for their upkeep. This point in history suggests that France was now ready to begin
rebuilding its identity. Precisely at this time, Géricault was in his studio at Faubourg du
Roule busily painting an image of the precariously intertwined figures in the Raft of the
Medusa. Could Géricault have conceived this painting to herald a new era? The vastness
of his painting, which measured 35 square metres, surely asserts much more than
condemnation of maritime incompetence. The pointing and leaning figure of Corread
functions like an indented exclamation mark to the narrative of liberal ascension.
109
Jardin, A. & Tudesq, A-J. (1983). op. cit. p. xi.
Artz, F. B. (1963). op. cit. p. 20 writes, ‘the Richelieu ministry, passed a more liberal electoral (1817), calculated to give greater
power in the elections to the middle class.’
111
Ibid. p. 70 & De Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966). op. cit. p. 148.
110
44
Subtle changes in the Raft of the Medusa’s later conception can be shown to closely
follow political developments reported in the press at the time. It could be argued that
Géricault had reflexively drawn on these latest developments to complete his painting.
On the 26 May 1819, three months before the Raft of the Medusa’s completion, the De
Serre press laws, formulated by the centralist group, the Doctrinaires, were enacted
with the underlying principle that, ‘an opinion, whatever it may be, does not become a
crime by becoming public.’112 As a consequence of this legislation the liberal press began
to freely publish articles critical of the covert practice of slavery.113 In the following three
months, as Géricault completes the final touches to the Raft of the Medusa he adds to
the apex, an ascending African figure. In late August 1819, after eight months of
uninterrupted work, he submits his painting into the Salon under the title Scene of a
Shipwreck.
In configuring the Raft of the Medusa Géricault drew on emotions and events that lay far
beyond the Medusa tragedy. Rosenblum notes the painting’s broad relationship to the
terrors and beliefs of the past:
By conferring tragic status upon anonymous victims rather than classical or
modern military heroes, by demonstrating that the human potential of terror
and chaos was more compelling than that of reason and order, Géricault set out
to destroy the premises of Davidian traditions, while nevertheless working
within their language of ideal form . . . The Medusa extinguishes the Age of
Enlightenment, revealing the dark and the terrifying truths that lie below the
layer of reason . . .114
112
113
114
De Bertier de Sauvigny, G. (1966). op.cit. p.161.
Ryan, M. (1997). op.cit., p.44, f.n.12.
Rosenblum, R. & Janson, H.W. (1984)., op. cit. p. 121.
45
As a consequence of drawing on decades of history larger than the event itself, the
painting appears to characterise the protagonists more as witnesses than victims of a
specific event. Apart from such occasional hints, as the bloodied axe, the violence is
banished from within the confines of the picture frame. As Grigsby writes;
the victims in Géricault’s picture appear to be martyrs to a violence larger
than themselves. The painting manages to evoke the sense that people were
being eaten but to repress the fact that they were being devoured by one
another.115
Unlike Neo-Classical painting, where a narrative is played out with some elements that
run counter to the story, the protagonists in the Raft of the Medusa all function in
narrative unison with one another. The figure of Corread, who in the original narrative
was unconscious and stretchered off the raft, is, in the painting, fully awake, a witness to
the possibility of rescue. Of particular interest is the older figure holding onto the youth
who is resigned to his fate. This figure has been characterised by scholars in various
guises. Critics of the day and later, Eitner interpret this figure as a reference to Ugolino
from Dante’s Divine Comedy, starving in prison and contemplating the thought of eating
his sons for survival.
116
Another interpretation by Ryan ironically cites the returned
General Marcus Sextus, reconciliatory émigré from Guerin’s 1799 Neo-Classical painting
of the same name now turned Ultra-Royalist fanatic.117
115
116
117
Grigsby, D.G. (2002). op. cit. p. 224.
Eitner, L. (1983). op. cit. p. 190
Ryan, M. (1997). Op. cit. p. 39 & p.51 f.n.83.
46
Guérin ,The Return of Marcus Sextus (1799).
Recently Grigsby has asserted that the figure represents the cannibal Empire wearing his
now faded legion of honour.118 This elderly figure, of the reluctant cannibal, waits his
due, just as much a witness as he is a perpetrator of his folly. That Géricault has been
capable of eliciting from scholars such varied responses from one single figure,
interpreting the figure from both the left and right of politics, counters the notion that
the Raft of the Medusa was squarely aimed at attacking the ‘Restoration nightmare’ as
one critic has suggested.119 The multiplicities of readings suggest that whoever this
elderly figure can be construed to be, Géricault’s intention was deliberately ambiguous,
allowing for alternate readings because of the complex feelings that the artist himself
held towards the past.
Cannibalism, the most infamous aspect of the original event, lies at the heart of the
narrative of the raft of the Medusa. To survive, the shipwrecked crew on the raft ate
their deceased colleagues, drying the flesh salted with sea water in the sun. I have
118
119
Grigby, D.G. (2002). Op. cit. p.224, Chenique, B.(2007). Op.cit. p. 28.
Boime, A. (2004)., op. cit. p. 143.
47
briefly mentioned the multiple interpretations that the father figure has elicited. All
these interpretations share one overriding feature, that of an elderly father figure who
betrays his younger descendants by placing his own survival above them. Ugolino, UltraRoyalists and the Regime of the Empire were all guilty of this crime. This is probably the
most damning metaphor for a young generation’s disenfranchisement that an artist
could construct, the eating of the young by the old. The fact that Géricault made
prominent reference to cannibalism in his painting within a relationship that is normally
considered paternalistic, and not with the mutinous soldiers as was implied in Corread
and Savigny’s account, is a substantial alteration of the original narrative. 120 Géricault’s
intentions here can only be substantiated via a reading of the Raft of the Medusa that
again accepts a wider historical perimeter. The foreign and distant maritime event
provided a huge attraction for Géricault not just because of the political scandal that had
followed, but also because the cannibalism that featured in the narrative had
intersected with his own psychological condition. It was a telling metaphor for the
events of the previous decades as they influenced the psyche of his generation. If this is
accepted then the relatively benign Louis XVIII and his 1819 liberal ministry are not the
target of criticism in this painting but the recipient of a poignant message. Utilising the
artifice of recreating a maritime event within the confines of a 35 metre square canvas,
the savagery of a civilisation is presented but also reconciled with a theme that is much
closer to home. The call of rescue that the Raft of Medusa announces is a demand for
recognition by a battered younger generation. This painting is much more than Émigré
incompetence under peacetime. The high mortality of the soldiers directly recalls an
earlier era of military casualty under Empire in which one in three French males of
120
Corread, A. & Savigny, J.B. (1818). Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816. London: Henry Colburn., p.51. Republished by
Marlboro Press, Vermont (1986).
48
Géricault’s generation were either killed or maimed. As if directly referencing this earlier
mortality, Géricault depicts seven members, a third of the twenty crew of the Raft of the
Medusa, as either dead or injured.
Unfortunately the liberalism that had presided over the politics of these years and
instilled in the Raft of the Medusa, was short-circuited at the time of the painting’s
exhibition in 1819 by a sharp unprecedented conservative turn of government. By the
middle of 1819 the liberal tide in politics had reached a high watermark. Géricault’s
painting at this time would have fitted seamlessly into the aims of the current
government. Decazes in the middle of 1819 could look upon this painting as an image
that highlighted his victorious four-year liberal push to overcome Ultra-Royalist
oppression, and as also symbolising his own political successes. No wonder Géricault had
the expectation of a state purchase. However, by the time Géricault had completed the
Raft of the Medusa in late August of 1819, the political tide in French politics was
already beginning to change.
In the final quarter of 1819 the Raft of the Medusa hung quietly in the Louvre. However,
in the King’s quarters with his favourite Decazes at his side, the mood was quite
different. The liberal experiment was now in full swing but Decazes and Louis XVIII
decided that with the election of the regicide Gregoire on the 11th of September, the
liberals had gone too far and that this was an event that bordered on insurrection. 121
Gregoire, a member from the extreme left, had bizarrely won the Isére seat through
Ultra-Royalist support. The generally held belief is that the extremists on each side of
121
Jardin, A. & Tudesq, A. (1983)., op.cit. Chronology page xi.
49
politics hated the moderate government more than they did each other, preferring
political chaos to compromised ideals.122 In September 1819, Louis XVIII and Decazes
decided, under international influence from the Allies’ need for ‘stabilisation’, to now
turn sharply to the right.
123
In October, Decazes formulated the ‘Law of the Double
Vote’ and brought this new law for approval to a special cabinet meeting on the 18th of
November 1819.124 The sole intention of the ‘Law of the Double Vote’ was to severely
disadvantage the liberals during the next elections.
Decazes’ turn to the Ultra-Royalists for support was completely contrary to all his
previous liberal sympathies. His liberal cabinet members, Dessolles, Gouvion Saint-Cyr
and Baron Louis, resigned in disgust at this move. The Medusa shipwreck had been a
political scandal that Decazes had used effectively to better his career in 1816, now, in
the final term of 1819, the incident became an embarrassing reminder of his own
political opportunism. Despite wide newspaper coverage at the time reviewing the Raft
of the Medusa there is a conspicuous absence of even one simple review by the widely
circulated Journal des Débats.
125
Decazes had leaked the Savigny narrative of the
Medusa shipwreck in 1816 to the Journal des Débats to generate a political scandal and
yet the journal now, omitted any comment on Géricault’s painting in 1819. This striking
omission by the Journal des Débats exists as possible evidence that Decazes now had
sought to actively disassociate himself from the Medusa scandal.
122
De Bertier de Sauvigny (1966)., op.cit. p. 163.
Tombs, R. (1996)., op.cit.p. 338.
124
Mansel.,P. (1966)., op.cit. p.372., & Artz (1963)., op.cit. p. 71-73. The votes of those individuals that paid more than 1,000 francs
in taxes were counted twice.
125
Chenique, B. (2007) ., op. cit. p. 10.
123
50
Seen in this context it was thus unlikely that Decazes would approve the purchase of the
Raft of the Medusa. Géricault’s hopes of a state purchase for the Raft of the Medusa,
commonly seen as wishful thinking by many art historians, seems eminently plausible
before the change in political tide. Indeed, he had received substantial support from the
Director of the Louvre, Louis De Forbin. De Forbin repeatedly lobbied the government to
purchase the Raft of the Medusa. He was however unsuccessful as his lobbying had
centred on his once political ally Decazes.126
By October Decazes cast a deaf ear to the liberal cause in return for the promise of what
was to be a short ill-fated Prime Ministership that began in November 1819, only to end
dramatically two months later. The murder on 13th February 1820 of the only Bourbon
capable of producing a monarch, the moderate Royalist Duc de Berry, led to Decazes’
forced resignation the following day. His feet, to quote the nineteenth-century romantic
historian Chateaubriand, had slipped in the Duc’s blood.127 In the following ten years the
government would be dominated by Ultra-Royalist platforms that stifled reform and
favoured inherited title, greater restriction of suffrage and strict press censorship.
The failure of the Raft of the Medusa to be acquired by the state left Géricault bitterly
disappointed and suffering a nervous breakdown. This was compounded further by what
he saw as an insult, an offer by De Forbin in December 1819 of a state religious
commission of 6,000 francs. Several years later, between 1822 and 1824, De Forbin
repeatedly, albeit unsuccessfully, offered the Raft of the Medusa at reduced cost for this
same amount, 6,000 francs on Géricault’s behalf. The state acquisition of the Raft of the
126
127
Boime, A. (2004)., op.cit. p. 145.
Tombs, R. (1996)., op. cit. p. 339, De Bertier de Sauvigny (1966)., op. cit. p. 166.
51
Medusa did occur finally, upon Géricault’s death in 1824. Géricault’s friends lobbied the
government to acquire the painting which they conceded to by purchasing it at the
original discounted price.
Having gambled and lost their bets at high points in their careers, Géricault and Decazes
each suffered falls from society that they would never fully recover from. What they
both left to history though was significantly different. Decazes’ legacy was that his name
would become synonymous with turncoat while Géricault’s legacy, the Raft of the
Medusa, has become the emblem of its time.
The Raft of the Medusa unfurled a narrative of promise that encompassed the
tumultuous events of a previous decade of France’s history. Decazes’ intention in
revealing the narrative to the press was to discredit émigré privilege and demonstrate
where France was destined under Ultra-Royalist leadership. Géricault’s intention in
transforming the Medusa’s survivors from victims to heroes was to picture what France
could become if the nation overcame the political turmoil that was so much a feature of
the previous decades. Géricault’s later attempt to have the Raft of the Medusa
purchased by the state at reduced cost, I suggest, was ultimately not a desperate move
for artistic acceptance but more an attempt to reintegrate a loss. Géricault was
motivated by the belief that the Raft of the Medusa required a state purchase to
complete the journey of the wounded males’ ameliorative message of recognition. This
gesture would demonstrate France’s acceptance of the loss that his generation had
sustained and the potential they still contained. The Raft of the Medusa was a flagship of
52
liberal promise to a generation that ultimately saw those promises bearing fruit in the
Revolution of 1830.
53
2
Géricault’s Wounded Male
Géricault originally sourced the motif of the wounded male from a secondary narrative
of French Neo-Classicism. The primary narrative that had driven Davidian Neo-Classicism
was that of the French Revolution of 1789 to create a new liberated society. French NeoClassicism depicted this ideal through a male body of perfect soundness. 128 The wellproportioned classical body represented to the new Republic the seamless union
between the newly created state and the self-regulating citizen. The most explicit
example that united public duty, fraternity and personal self-sacrifice to the state is
Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii (1785).
David, The Oath of the Horatii (1784).
The secondary narrative, which was a direct consequence of this commitment to the
Revolution and was later enforced through conscription en masse under the Empire,
128
Crow, T. (1997). Emulations, p. 299.
54
was the civic sacrifice of young men’s lives to the cause of Liberty. This sacrifice and
expression of civil obedience was expressed by the Neo-classicists through the motif of
the wounded male. Gros' painting Bonaparte Among the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (1803)
is perhaps the clearest example of this iconography.
Gros, detail of Bonaparte Among the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa (1803).
The fall of the Empire in 1815 led to an artistic crisis within French Neo-Classical
iconography. Neo-Classicists like Gros and David would in the ensuing years retreat from
contemporary subjects and exclusively set the faultless male form frozen within distant
antiquity. The wounded male, which had featured prominently in the work of NeoClassicists like Girodet, David and Gros’ under the Empire, was now abandoned in the
Restoration.129 This was not the response Theodore Géricault had to the image of the
wounded male. Over the next five years Géricault would transform the wounded male
from an image of civic duty into a Romantic symbol embodying a rising generation’s
personal dissent.
129
O’Brien, D. (2004). After the Revolution, p.207.Pennsylvania State University Press:Pennsylvannia.
55
In this chapter I present the first part of my argument of how an image of civil obedience
is remarkably transformed into a form that attempts to resist and redefine cultural
constructions of the citizen-self. Instead of examining the merits of individual works over
this period as previous scholars have done, my response in this chapter is to
contextualise the significant points of transformation of the wounded male within
Géricault’s personal history as a citizen and the normative expectations of wider society.
Géricault, The Farrier’s Signboard (1814).
I begin this chapter with an analysis of The Farrier’s Signboard (1814), a melancholy
work undertaken on the eve of the Empire’s fall. Choosing to focus on The Farrier’s
56
Signboard rather than Géricault’s early Salon submissions, as is the usual path for
scholars, requires some explanation. I would like to suggest The Farrier’s Signboard is far
more reflective of Géricault’s civilian persona than either of his first two militaristic
Salon paintings, The Charging Chasseur (1812) and The Wounded Cuirassier (1814).
These two paintings ultimately function as camouflaged fragments of a self, set within a
visual template of Empire painting created by Gros. As a consequence of military culture
being the dominant narrative under Napoleon, the soldier-citizen features significantly
in Géricault’s earlier work. However, unlike Gros, Géricault avoided military service and
his short stint in the musketeers, as we saw in the previous chapter, was a politically
motivated gesture to end warfare. Like the skilled tradesman represented in The
Farrier’s Signboard, Géricault lived most of the time the life of a civilian French citizen.
The Farrier’s Signboard is an unsigned oil painting on rough wooden boards measuring
122 by 102 centimetres. The signboard is a mysterious painting depicting a maker and
fitter of horseshoes holding a hammer in his right hand and the bridle of a rearing horse
with his left. Intended as a street sign, it is thought that the piece was commissioned for
a specific farrier in St.Germain.130 Rather than demean and distract from the work, the
paintings’ surface of rough boards, the protruding nails and the occasionally exposed
wood grain, provide it with a sculptural quality that highlights and echoes the work’s
assured yet wounded masculinity. The vertical gaps of millimetres between the wooden
boards that make up the signboard create vertical columns that echo the figures
classical origins and reinforce his standing presence. The protruding nails that appear
throughout the image number more than fifty. Three nails appear, St.Sebastian-like, in
130
Grunchec, P. (1985). Op.cit.
57
the torso of the farrier, one in the chest and two in the stomach and another nail
disturbs the surface of his inner right thigh.
Unlike today, the horse was used in Géricault’s time primarily for transport. In The
Farrier’s Signboard Géricault has given the common figure of a blacksmith an unusual
romantic presence. This heroic depiction was normally reserved for representations of
military commanders, as in Portrait of Carbinier with Horse (1815) and Portrait of a
Carabinier (1815).
Géricault,Portrait of a Carbinier with Horse (1815).
The Farrier’s Signboard is an important work that marks Géricault’s first creation of
civilian heroism. The sullen disposition cast on the farrier’s face also reveals someone
who is perhaps shadowed by a broad disappointment. Both Eitner (1983) and
Rosenblum (1984) make reference to the tragic air that surrounds the farrier.
Rosenblum (1984) writes that ‘the expression of the blacksmith is clouded by a strange
58
mood, discernible in his furrowed brows and stunned gaze and echoed in the sombre
shadows that surround him.’131 The uneasy mood of the farrier is further accentuated by
his awkward stance. His left leg appears to be slipping down from the signs’ vertical
plane, stretching a foot longer than his right leg. Directly behind the farrier’s awkward
left leg is the horse’s right hind leg which threatens to boot the farrier from the actual
sign itself.
In early nineteenth-century France both transport and artistic ambition shared a
common purpose. By 1814, Napoleon’s war machine had enlisted the skills of both for
over a decade. The budget for paintings commissioned for the Empire increased fourfold
from 1803 and remained that way for more than a decade.132 Additionally, during the era
of Napoleon, the figure of the farrier assumed heightened importance as he was largely
responsible for maintaining the well-being of horses which were, in effect, the vehicles of
Napoleonic war. Like the figure of the artist, the farrier’s position was now inextricably
linked with the ideology of the Empire. O’Brien (2006) comments on the relationship
between the artist and the military;
For Géricault and his generation, a successful career as a history painter must
have appeared to depend overwhelmingly on an ability to paint contemporary
military subjects.133
In this historical framework, where worldly ambition is seen within the ideological
context of the Empire, it becomes possible to understand the farrier’s heroic stance and
the corresponding implications for the artist. Both the farrier and the artist had
undergone a transformation that began with the French Revolution. Its creation of the
131
Rosenblum, R. (1984). Op.cit. p.118.
O’Brien, D. (2006). Op.cit. p. 259.
133
O’Brien,D. (2006). Op.cit. P.209.
132
59
citizen enlisted both figures to the revolutionary ideals of the Republic: liberty, equality
and fraternity. Enlightenment ideas had not only taken the artist beyond his role of
skilled craftsman to a painter of significant political magnitude, but also heightened the
importance of ‘common’ labouring figures such as the farrier. In The Farrier’s Signboard,
Géricault acknowledges the farrier’s importance in society beyond simple labouring,
casting him in a distinctly modern heroic role.
When The Farrier’s Signboard was painted in the early part of 1814, the downfall of
Napoleon was imminent, beginning with his German defeat in October 1813. Unlike his
colleague Vernet, Géricault did not join the National Guards in March 1814 to
participate in a futile resistance to the Allies at the Barriere de Clichy. Did Géricault, like
the rest of France, tired of the enormous sacrifice of life, witness the defeat of Napoleon
with a secret relief?134 Even if he felt a secret relief upon Napoleon’s defeat, the collapse
of the Empire would have raised doubts about his artistic direction with his primary
career path as an artist of the Empire in disarray.135 As Rosenblum (1984) writes, ‘For
Géricault, as for many other members of a disillusioned generation that had experienced
the eclipse of Napoleon, a turbulent cargo of homeless emotions and grand pictorial
rhetoric had to be discharged in unfamiliar subjects.’136 The strange mood of the farrier
that Rosenblum observes might be understood as the uncertainty that Géricault is likely
to have felt about his artistic career and sense of self with the collapse of the Napoleonic
Empire.
134
Eitner, L. (1983). Op.cit. p.49.
O’Brien, D. (2006). Op.cit.p. 209 indicates a short period of doubt following the fall of the Empire. Eitner, L. (1983) p.85 writes that
Géricault made an abrupt change in style and subject matter just prior to Waterloo. Whitney, W. (1997). Géricault In Italy. New
Haven: Yale University Press., p.2 observes that the final fall of Napoleon occurred at Géricault’s most formative moment as an artist
and indicates that Géricault had sustained a certain ambivalence about his direction since his success with the Charging Chasseur in
1812.
136
Rosenblum(1984) p. 118.
135
60
Chronologically, The Farrier’s Signboard sits conspicuously between Géricault’s two
salon paintings of military subjects, The Charging Chasseur (1812) and The Wounded
Cuirassier (1814).137
Géricault, The Charging Chasseur (1812).
Géricault, The Wounded Cuirassier (1814).
Géricault made his debut at the Salon of 1812 with The Charging Chasseur, for which he
received a gold medal. The Charging Chasseur was heavily influenced by Gros and is a
painting that ‘wholly identified with the national and modern current of the Empire’s
art.’138 In late 1814 Géricault hastily completed The Wounded Cuirassier and exhibited
the painting at the Salon of 1814 together with his earlier Salon work, The Charging
Chasseur. Although Géricault may have been seeking to capitalise on the sentiments
surrounding the fall of the Empire, The Wounded Cuirassier was poorly received and was
regarded by Salon reviewers as an ‘uncomfortable reminder’ of the fall of the Empire. 139
The critic M. Boutard made oblique reference to The Charging Chasseur and The
137
138
139
Eitner, L. (1983). Op. cit. p. 49.
Eitner. L. (1983). Op.cit. p.35.
Eitner L.(1983). Op.cit.p.63
61
Wounded Cuirassier when, in the Journal des Débats of 6 November 1814, he wrote that
there were ‘still too many officers and leather breeches in this exhibition.’ 140 The critical
response to his paintings, aligned with his failure to secure a state purchase, was so
painful, that when they were returned to his studio, ‘unable to bear the sight of them,
he had them rolled and put away.’141 Not long after Napoleon’s complete defeat at
Waterloo on June 18 1815, Géricault shed the military camouflaging skin of Empire
painting that is demonstrated in these two Salon works, never to adopt this format
again.142 His immediate response was to embark on a broad study of classicism at the
Louvre.
Seen within the wider context of the Restoration discussed in the previous chapter,
Géricault’s studious turn to classicism was undertaken in the knowledge that his possible
future career as an artist of the Empire was now a redundant dream of the past. If
Davidian Neo-classicism correlated with the emergence of the French Empire, in
Géricault’s case, his turn towards classicism coincided with the final catastrophe of the
Napoleonic regime. Freed from the reins of Empire, Géricault’s classicism of 1815-16
was, in one sense, less constrained than his Neo-Classical predecessors. However
accompanying that freedom was a lack of public purpose. This wounding of public
function is crucial to interpreting not only the exuberance but also the anger expressed
in Géricault’s classical drawings and paintings of this 1815-16 period. In addition,
Géricault’s own life at this time was one of secret personal turmoil and a possible
interpretation is that this is also reflected in his classical work at that time.
140
141
142
Eitner L. (1983). ibid.
Crow, T. (2006). Op.cit. p.28 quoting Géricault’s friend Monfort in Notes (1867).
O’Brien. D.(2006). Op. Cit. p.208-210.
62
Two significant and disturbing events in Géricault’s life provide the background to his
1815-16 Louvre work. The first was the realisation of the enormous mortality that
France had suffered under Napoleon’s rule between 1804 and 1815. Between these
years, as Tombs states, ‘the costs of a generation of revolution and war had been huge:
perhaps 1.5 million deaths.’ As mentioned earlier, more than one in three of all boys
born between 1790 and 1795 were killed or maimed. 143 In his autobiographical work
Memoires d’ un bourgeois de Paris (1856), opera manager and publisher Louis Désiré
Véron recalls the return of the once proud French Grand Army in 1814:
Some of the horsemen dragged their exhausted horses by the bridle. There
was blood everywhere...many of the soldiers were forced to walk, despite leg
and foot wounds, supporting themselves on their sabres...On both sides of the
boulevard, spectators seated in chairs looked on.144
It is highly likely that Géricault witnessed such gruesome parades of wounded soldiers,
largely his own his own age, returning from war. Although scenes of returning wounded
soldiers did not appear in Géricault’s work until 1818, in such images as Retreat from
Russia (1818) and Cartload of Wounded (1818-19), the growing awareness of the
mortality and carnage that France had suffered between 1804 and 1815 served as a
backdrop to the classical work that he produced in the Louvre.
The second event that altered Géricault’s life was his clandestine affair, begun in 1815 at
the age of 24, with his uncle’s 30-year-old wife, Alexandrine-Modeste Caruel.
143
144
Tombs. R. (1996) . Op. cit.p. 330.
Véron, L. D. (1856). Mémoires d'un Bourgeois de Paris, I., p. 218 quoted in Eitner, L.(1983)., op. cit. p.66.
63
Alexandrine was the wife of the 58 year old Jean-Baptiste Caruel, the powerful head of
the large family business for whom Géricault’s father worked. A supportive friendship
developed between Géricault and Alexandrine following the death of his mother in
1808, when he was 17. Contrary to Géricault’s father’s intentions of having him continue
his school education, Alexandrine and Jean-Baptiste secretly arranged his artistic
education in 1808.145
Against this background of mortality, infidelity and the turbulent collapse of national
identity, Géricault began his work at the Louvre in 1815. His contribution to classicism
during this period is unique, and bears little resemblance to the Neo-Classicism that he
had shunned under his previous teacher Guerin. Nor does the work resemble Gros’ late
classical work, which revolved around the preservation of the well-proportioned male in
remote Arcadia. Though not set within a contemporary context, Géricault’s later
classicism of 1815-16 is imbued with an element of personalised realism that reflects the
turmoil of the period.
Géricault, Zoubaloff Sketchbook (1815-16) P. 10.
145
Eitner, L. (1983). Op,cit. p. 13.
64
Géricault, Zoubaloff Sketchbook (1815-16) P.11.
While studying at the Louvre, Géricault produced two bodies of work. The first is a
collection of classical sketches in the Zoubaloff Sketchbook and the second, a varied
group of about twenty works on paper. The sketches in the Zoubaloff Sketchbook
indicate a maturing artist, who with his drawings of classical motifs such as The Iliad, The
Odyssey and the Death of Hector, had returned to the rudimentary alphabet of
antiquity. These drawings hint at deep emotions that are constrained by the rigidity of
the motifs. However, in his continuing study at the Louvre Géricault produced a second,
distinctly separate group of work. Mirroring the collapse of the heroic narratives of
freedom that followed the Empire’s fall, Géricault’s classicism in the second body of
work addresses all the confusion of public and private values that followed that
catastrophe. These works on paper separately develop and sometimes vengefully
combine themes of cruelty, death and lust. These include Couple Embracing, The
Embrace, Couple Intertwining, Executioner Strangling A Prisoner, Satyr and Nymph, all of
which date from 1815, and Man Rescuing A Woman From the Flood, The Dying Paris and
Study for Paris and Oenone which date from 1816. The twenty drawings of 1815-1816,
far from being romantic excesses of the imagination for their depictions of wounding,
coitus and frustration, operate as artistic re-interrogations of Géricault’s predicaments
which had been unleashed at the moment of the fall of Empire.
65
Géricault, The Dying Paris (1816).
Of particular interest, amongst the Louvre works on paper, The Dying Paris and Study for
Paris and Oenone, depicts the fall of the warrior Paris at the siege of Troy. With the
relatively recent fall of the French capital Paris on the 17th July 1815, these works on
paper suggest more than a simple ancient narrative retold. The Dying Paris and Study for
Paris and Oenone seem especially driven by powerful contemporaneous associations
with French identity. Suggesting the loss of identity through the death of Paris, these
works double this loss with the conspicuous absence of Oenone, a key figure who is
normally depicted in this narrative. In both works, the scene of beckoning warriors
carrying their dead comrade is composed without the presence of the potentially
healing figure of Oenone. The absence of a possible saviour for Paris mirrors the
historical reality of Paris the city at the time that Géricault was making these works.
France was occupied by 1.2 million allied troops in September 1815, with 40,000 in Paris
alone.146
146
De Bertier de Sauvigny (1966). Op.cit. pages 119-20, 128-9, 146-7, 151-52.
66
Géricault, Study For Paris and Oenone (1816).
Foretelling the reaching figures in the Raft of the Medusa, the figures in The Dying Paris
and Study for Paris and Oenone mourn the dying Paris, and in so doing draw attention to
their own humanity. The poignancy of these drawings stems from the manner in which
the protagonists are reaching beyond the constraining frame of the artwork. I suggest
that the exclusion of Oenone, the potential saviour, has direct parallels with Géricault’s
experiences with the loss of national identity. The collapse of the Empire, the end of an
epoch, was an event that could only be defined in these works by all encompassing
absence.
The Empire had uncompromisingly blurred and suppressed private emotions with public
duty, keeping in check such emotions with a militant homo-social upbringing and
compulsory military duty. As Censer and Hunt (2001) observe;
The economy, education, and even morals came under government
supervision . . . Believing education was crucial to military success and national
wealth, Napoleon inaugurated the lycees, state-run secondary schools for boys
from better-off families. Students in these schools wore military uniforms, and
67
drum rolls signalled the beginning and end of classes . . . Every aspect of this
authoritarian state was stamped with Napoleon’s personality . . .147
Géricault, Couple Embracing (1815-16).
Géricault’s affair with Alexandrine required the cultivation of secrecy and a compromise
of civic duty, which echoed the tumultuous emotions of the coinciding fall of the Empire.
In Couple Embracing, a muscular kneeling naked male supports with both arms his
writhing naked female partner. Using his left hand to draw back the left leg of his lover
he enters her from behind. As he presses his face into the locks of her long hair, he pulls
her upright with the support of his right arm on her left breast. In ecstasy, the female
whose eyes are closed touches her brow with her left hand. She languidly twists whilst
arching her torso, leaning her right arm onto the left shoulder of her lover. The tender
strokes of wash present in Couple Embracing act out a deliberate moral abandon which
appears to relish the relinquishing of required codes of decency.
147
Censer, J.R. and Hunt, L. (2001). Op.cit. p.148.
68
Géricault, Executioner Strangling a Prisoner (1815-16).
The foregrounding of private emotions continues in Executioner Strangling a Prisoner. In
this drawing, a muscular man stands over a resigned, semi-reclining younger man whose
hands are tied and strangles him with a thick rope. In spite of the title, this is not a
typical scene of official execution undertaken in the context of state authorised
punishment, since the emblems and representatives of an identifying official authority
are absent. Similarly, the crowd of interested members of the public are also omitted.
This is a scene that depicts, within the confines of a private space, the dominance of one
man over a younger man. The heroic cooperation of the young man to the morbid needs
of the older man carries decidedly sadomasochistic homo-erotic undertones. The
younger man, with a dutiful expression on his face, pushes his bent left leg into the
crotch of the executioner who strangles him. Strangely, the gesture of pushing by the
young man, rather than destabilising the executioner, appears to form an intimate bond
that steadies and supports the executioner’s task. A hopeless, albeit erotic fatalism is
69
conveyed in this drawing where men, perhaps maddened by decades of homo-social
confinement, now turn relentlessly against each other.
The common feature of these four works is the inherent physicality of purpose of the
figures. They are not defined by uniform or national emblem, but rather by the
perimeters of bodily perception. These are bodies that make meaning of the world not
by parading in uniform down crowded streets or dying heroically on the battlefield. The
naked and semi-naked figures grope, squeeze and carry each other while engaging in
existential actions of self-definition. The Dying Paris, Study For Paris and Oenone, Couple
Embracing and Executioner Strangling A Prisoner are early articulations of an emerging
somatic intelligence in Géricault’s work that I suggest occurs partially in response to the
loss of a symbolic order. In forthcoming years Géricault would cultivate this somatic
intelligence, articulating private and public loss through the depiction of the physical
wounding of the male. The physical endeavours of carrying, penetration and constriction
demonstrated in these early works on paper articulate narratives that suggest a psyche
that is both stimulated and thwarted by loss.
The focus on explicit sexual gratification in Couple Embracing and the unremorseful
depiction of revenge in Executioner Strangling A Prisoner reflect an artistic outlet for
privately felt emotions that could never be allowed to see the light of day in early
nineteenth-century France. Like the pre-Revolutionary period of the Rococo, they
flagrantly disregarded later French Neo-Classicism’s restrained attitude to wanton
sensuality. This restraint involving patriotic civic values was explicitly adopted by the
70
new Bourgeois after the Revolution and continued into the Restoration.148 The sexual
explicitness in Géricault’s classical work of 1816 is suitably confined to intimate scenes
beyond the public sphere. There is an implicit understanding that the enjoyment of any
pleasures was to be undertaken privately so as not to disturb the new construct of the
citizen and the laws they must follow.
On the surface at least, Géricault accepted the new paradigm of civic behaviour that
emerged in the early nineteenth-century formulation of the citizen. The peaceful
Restoration now highlighted the responsibilities that young men had to the state as
citizens, not soldiers. Responding ambiguously to these self-regulatory restrictions, he
reconstructed within his own personalised classicism a private heroic figure utilising the
suffering wounded male. This heroic configuration partially recall the previous French
Neo-Classical figure of sacrifice to the state, but differs substantially through social
context to which it belongs. Géricault’s wounded male was ultimately an amoral
construction set in a private realm. Compared to the previous eras of Revolution and
Empire, under the Restoration there was a conspicuous lack of opportunity for public
support and state sponsorship of heroic symbols of sacrifice within the master narrative
of Empire. Unlike the soldiers depicted in Gro’s Bonaparte Among the Plague-Stricken at
Jaffa, the suffering males in The Dying Paris and Study for Paris and Oenone are defined
by the complete absence of any master narrative. Géricault’s denial of this situation or
perhaps the alienated heroic acceptance of his predicament meant that his personalised
classicism of 1816, of which Couple Embracing and Executioner Strangling a Prisoner are
typical examples, was emotionally contained within the dark recesses of his psyche.
148
O’Brien, D. (2006). Op.cit. p.220-222.
71
Géricault exchanged French Neo-classicism’s public function of civic narratives of virtue
for charged erotic tales of frustrated desire and thwarted ambitions.
Géricault, The Embrace (1815-16).
In late 1816 Géricault travelled to Italy for a year where he continued his classical
investigations. His year’s work in Italy culminated in two groups of oil paintings that
depict determined men wrestling with aggravated animals. One group of paintings
centres on the oil painting The Cattle Market (1817), which shows three men
slaughtering cattle. Another group, which includes the painting Start of the Race of the
Barberi Horses (1817), depicts men in Italian dress desperately holding excited horses
just prior to the start of the Barberi Horse Race in Rome. The fallen figure, which
appears to be an early hybrid of the wounded male, repeatedly emerges below the
struggling grooms in the Barberi Horse Race series. Although the explicit wounding of
males is absent from both groups of works, the threat of wounding is imminent. These
paintings share two features, the difficulty of containing untamed animals and the
animals’ heroic surge for freedom despite the risks of injury and harm.
72
Géricault, Start of the Race of the Barberi Horses (1817).
A division emerges in the content of Géricault’s Italian work between these works in oil
and those done at the same time on paper. The oil paintings of horse races and
slaughterhouses feature a homo-social world of men engaged in cruel and competitive
actions. In contrast, his Italian works on paper such as Leda and the Swan (1816-17),
Centaur Abducting a Woman (1816-1817) and Satyr and Nymph (1817) feature women
prominently with men in fervent erotic activity. If each is clearly a displacement of the
other, Géricault’s more brutal treatment of desire in his works in oil is more socially
acceptable within public nineteenth-century norms than his more explicitly erotic
treatments on paper. In these works in oil, desire is precariously controlled and
overcome within an environment of male fraternity. The fervent erotic activities that
Géricault depicted in his works on paper stand in stark contrast to the gladiatorial
violence of the male-only figures in his canvas oils.
73
Géricault, Satyr Abducting Nymph (1817).
Géricault, Satyr and Nymph (1817).
Géricault witnessed the Barberi horse race in Rome along the Via del Corso in February
of 1817.149 The race was an annual event on the Roman calendar that had its origins in
antiquity. Like other ancient games, this horse race had some cruel and savage aspects.
About twenty wild horses were imported from the Barbery Coast for the event and just
prior to the race the horses were deliberately irritated and provoked with sharp
sticks.150 In an agitated state, and with razors attached to their legs, the horses were
released and stampeded down the central thoroughfare of the Via del Corso. Injury
inevitably resulted and a number of these horses were subsequently put down.
The Barberi Horse Race series is a substantial body of work consisting of about seventyfive pieces. Twenty oil studies alone exist of this race. The almost obsessive and constant
reworking of the theme suggests a frustration with his subject that is akin to the
struggling grooms depicted within these paintings. The grooms vainly attempt to
stabilise themselves against the horses they strive to control just as Géricault attempts
to make concrete an image that constantly eludes him. The Barberi race works have
been consistently interpreted within the standard romantic themes of man versus beast
149
150
Whitney, W.(1997). Op.cit.p. 89.
Eitner, L. (1983). Op.cit. p. 117-118, Whitney, W. (1997). Op.cit. p. 89-92.
74
and controlling animal passions.151 But an alternative interpretation can be posited. The
Barberi Horse Race series depicts a chaotic and violent sequence of events without the
presence or inference of a guiding cultural figurehead. This is not unusual in such
subjects but this absence becomes conspicuous when seen in the traditional aesthetic
context of French Neo-classicism and the art of the Empire. Early French Neo-classicism
had consistently drawn upon guiding heroic figures from antiquity, to create Republican
narratives that emphasised public duty overcoming private feeling, as in The Oath of
Horatii (1784). Later, Neo-classicism was put in service of the needs of the Empire.
Talented artists such as Gros were enlisted to depict Napoleon as an extraordinary figure
who conquered all evil, as in Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken in Jaffa (1804).
Géricault also created art for the Empire with paintings such as The Charging Chasseur,
which invoked the guiding figure of Napoleon. The choice of the chaotic event of the
Italian Barberi horse race for a major classical painting appears to be an act that
deliberately disrupts the ability to include or infer the presence of a guiding cultural
figurehead. This disruption is a radical departure from Neo-Classical tradition and
Géricault’s reasons for it warrant further consideration.
The Barberi Horse Race series bears an unlikely compositional resemblance to a group of
works on paper that Gericault completed two years earlier in 1814. These studies depict
a parade of horses before Louis XVIII, and were intended for a larger work to celebrate
the monarch’s return, that was never realised. The most developed of the studies, a
watercolour, pencil, pen and wash titled Parade Before Louis XVIII (c. 1814), shows a
threateningly turbulent parade of horses before the recently installed monarch Louis
151
See Eitner, L. (1983). Op.cit. p. 122 writes that Géricault, ‘could hardly have failed to recognize, at an early stage of the work, that
his subject’s deeper significance...was the elemental conflict between animal passion and human will.’
75
XVIII. As in the Barberi Horse Race series, a groom in the bottom right of this
watercolour struggles to control a rebellious horse. Does Géricault reveal some doubt in
this work about the monarch’s capabilities through his ineffectual presence on the steps
of Versailles?
Géricault, Detail of Parade Before Louis XVIII (1814).
As with the three works each titled Start of the Barberi Race (1817), the action in
Parade Before Louis XVIII turns in on itself and a dusty chaos is about to ensue within the
foreground of the classical, columned buildings. The visual parallels that these parade
works of 1814 have to the Barberi Horse Race series are undeniable. The significant
difference is that Louis XVIII features awkwardly as a guiding presence within the
watercolour’s scene of dusty turbulence. The absence of a cultural figurehead within the
Barberi race series becomes even more revealing if we examine two aquatints by G.B
Romero published in Rome in 1805. Scholars conclude that Géricault must have
possessed examples of these prints citing their remarkable similarity to Géricault’s
Barberi Horse Race series.152 Taken from the drawings by the Florentine Neo-Classicist
152
Whitney, W. (1997). Op.cit. p.99.
76
Giovanni Battista Dell’Era, Start of the Race and Recapture of the Horses after the Finish,
these aquatints by Romero, unlike Géricault’s works, conspicuously depict within
classical tradition a Roman Emperor and his accompanying dignitaries. In deliberately
excluding these prominent figures in his compositions of the Barberi races, Géricault was
utilising a device he had earlier used in the Paris works on paper. Seen within the Neoclassical tradition, the defining absence of a guiding figure readily reflects the turbulent
Restoration year of 1816.
Romero after Dell’Era, Start of the Race (1805).
Compositionally the action in the Barberi horse race works is shown from a slightly raised
perspective so that one looks down on the event. Examining the various depictions of
the race, one image repeatedly surfaces. Between the legs of the stampeding horses a
fallen figure appears and disappears from view. The fallen figure has appeared before in
Géricault’s work, most touchingly in the Sketch for the Wounded Cuirassier. However, in
the Barberi Horse Race Series Géricault departs from this more gentlemanly depiction of
the fallen figure. In these works he is no longer a half sitting soldier, as in Sketch for the
77
Wounded Cuirassier, but rather a groom who, failing to control his horse has dramatically
fallen to the ground. In this precarious position the fallen groom threatens to be
trampled upon at any moment by a racing horse. Compared to the resting wounded
soldier in Sketch for the Wounded Cuirassier, the fallen grooms in the Barberi Horse Race
Series offer a much more traumatised version of the disabled male. The artistic source
for the fallen figure is a fresco by Raphael entitled The Expulsion of Heliodorus (1511-12),
which Géricault saw in Rome.153 His, Study after Raphael’s The Expulsion of Heliodorus
(1816-17) is a careful pencil study of the figure of Heliodorus, who is located on the
lower right of Raphael’s fresco. This figure and that by Raphael bear an uncanny
resemblance to the kneeling figures reaching out in the Raft of the Medusa that Géricault
would paint two years later. Like the fallen grooms in the Barberi horse race works,
Heliodorus is about to be trampled by a rearing horse.
Géricault, Study after The Expulsion of Heliodorus (1816-17).
Raphael, detail of The Expulsion of Heliodorus (1511-12).
Importantly Géricault would later choose this same low point of view of the fallen figure
to create much of his later work. This is the view that is from someone below who is a
153
Whitney, W. (1997). Op.cit. p.32.
78
witness to the action that occurs from above. Pre-Italian works such as The Charging
Chasseur and The Wounded Cuirassier show an angle of vision from slightly above the
scenes depicted. In contrast, the post-Italian work that includes depictions of soldiers
retreating from Russia, including the oil painting Wounded Soldiers in a Cart (1818), his
related lithographs and watercolours of this subject and the Raft of Medusa, all share an
angle of vision in which the view is taken from the vulnerable position below eye level.
Not only do the works on paper, Mameluke Unhorsed by a Charge of Grenadiers (1818)
and Cavalry Battle (1818), utilise this low point of view but they also feature the fallen
wounded male as a major figure in the lower left hand corner. Whereas the view from
above utilises theatrical distance to convey action, the view from below invites an
absorption into the picture. In these later works dramatic realism takes precedence over
reserved theatrical contrivance. Géricault’s utilisation of the point of view of the fallen
figure after his trip to Italy reveals an implicit identification with such a figure.154
Géricault, Mameluke Unhorsed by a Charge of Grenadiers (1818).
Géricault, Cavalry Battle (1818).
The fallen figure appears throughout Géricault’s Italian work both in his contemporary
studies of everyday life and in his work that sources classical antiquity. It has a powerful
presence because, unlike the depiction of the erotic form which is exclusively located in
154
Géricault’s early death was caused by an infection of the spine from repeatedly falling off his horse.
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antiquity, the fallen figure occurs in both worlds. When Géricault depicts a collapsed
Italian citizen, who has suffered a seizure in Figures Surrounding an Injured Man (181617), it has the same resonance as his classical depiction of Hector in Figure study (Death
of Hector) (1817).
Géricault, Figures Surrounding an Injured Man (1816-17).
Géricault, Figure Study (Death of Hector) (1817).
The emergence of the fallen figure as a significant motif in Géricault’s work coincides
with his troubled emotional state during his stay in Rome. Though busy with artistic
activity, Géricault writes of isolation and boredom. These feelings are accompanied by a
troubled longing to be reunited with his secret mistress, Alexandrine-Modeste. Géricault
is obviously distressed when he writes to his close friend Dorcy in Paris; ‘But how you will
pity me when I talk with you calmly about the terrible troubles into which I have
recklessly thrown myself.’155 Géricault is described at this time as having, ‘lived almost in
solitude, and had spells of hard work, followed by discouragements during which he let
himself sink into a deep melancholy. He had brought his troubled heart with him, the
source of his sorrows.’156 In the latter part of Géricault’s emotional letter to Dorcy he
155
156
Eitner, L. (1983). Op.cit. p. 134 quoting a letter by Dorcy that appears in Clement (1879). Op.cit. p.89.
Clement, C. (1879) quoted by Eitner, L. (1983). Op.cit, p. 134.
80
confesses to have found a deep solace from his troubles within their friendship. As
Géricault writes;
You understood me and I loved you; this was truly a source of peace and
happiness to me. Now I am disoriented and confused. I try in vain to find
support; nothing seems solid, everything escapes me, deceives me. Our earthly
hopes and desires are only vain fancies, our successes mere mirages that we
try to grasp. If there is one thing certain in this world, it is our pains. Suffering
is real, pleasure only imaginary.157
From this letter it becomes clear that Géricault’s psychological state at this time
resembles that of a fallen figure. Like his fallen Barberi race figures, here is a person who
has given up on the fraudulently competitive aspects of the race yet his heart still
painfully yearns to be included in that race. In contrast to the wounded males that
appear in Géricault’s later work of 1818, the fallen Barberi figures occupy a profoundly
isolated space. The intimate bond of friendship with Dorcy that Géricault cites in his
letter as alleviating his isolation, only becomes apparent in such later work as Wagon
Load of Wounded, where similarly wounded or distressed males physically support each
other in harsh times. Géricault’s fallen figure carries all the impending anxiety of
someone who is about to be wounded. The motif of the solitary fallen figure developed
between the years 1816 and 1817 functions as a logical and chronological prescript to
the wounded male supported by his peers that appears later in 1818.
Géricault had ambitiously intended to create a thirty-foot painting of the Barberi horse
race for the Salon but he abandoned the idea sometime between 1817 and 1818. Eitner
has suggested that he abandoned this idea because the Barberi event did not fit into any
157
Eitner, L. (1983). Op.cit. p. 135 quoting a letter by Géricault that appears in Clement, C. (1879).Op. cit. p.90..
81
recognisable Salon category.158 This theory is plausible, however the Raft of the Medusa
too is in this respect equally problematic. Other alternate factors are also likely to have
contributed to his abandonment of the idea. The violent political landscape that I have
proposed inspired the Barberi Horse Race Series had significantly changed when
Géricault returned to Paris in November 1817. The conservative Ultra-Royalist Chambre
Introuvable had been dissolved and a new liberalised ministry had been installed.
Significant tensions were still present between the right and left factions but the
situation had certainly eased. The new liberalised ministry had now instilled more hope
in developing a parliamentary liberal democracy. On his return to Paris in 1817 Géricault
would have perceived the general political mood much more optimistically than when
he left for Italy in 1816. It is likely then he did not complete the Barberi races as a Salon
painting because he realised that such a completed painting, if unsuccessful, would no
longer suit the more optimistic mood of the day.
Géricault’s different treatments of desire between his overtly erotic works on paper and
his works in oil of a ruthless, competitive homo-social world of men, suggests that he did
not seek to challenge current aesthetic moral conventions that marginalised erotic
experience. Leda and the Swan, Centaur Abducting a Woman and Satyr and Nymph
contain forbidden bestial overtones that provide a suitable metaphor for the illegality of
his secret affair. The powerful eroticism of Leda and the Swan with its gothic overtones,
is expressed within a chiaroscuro darkened, moonlit forest landscape. Beyond the
enforced laws of nineteenth-century morality Centaur Abducting a Woman and Satyr
and Nymph exist in an unregulated world of unfettered desire in which centaurs and
158
Eitner, L. (1983) . Op.cit. p. 134.
82
satyrs, following their primal instincts, unashamedly seduce young forest nymphs.
Géricault clearly understood that the powerful erotic experiences displayed in these
works and which were almost certainly sourced from his affair, were outside the serious
concerns of history painting and therefore confined to the minor genre of works on
paper. Nevertheless, in confining the expression of these erotic experiences to a minor
genre, I propose Géricault either struggled to contain these potent feelings or
deliberately reformulated them within the motif of the wounded male.
Géricault, Leda and the Swan (1816-17).
Three months after his return from Italy in February 1818, Géricault conceives of a large
painting inspired by the shipwreck of the French naval frigate Medusa off the coast of
Africa. This was to be no ordinary recreation of a French military event. Between
Géricault’s worlds of private erotic fantasy and public aspiration one figure slipped
between the two, providing a window into the hidden desires of the young male citizen
83
under the Restoration. Enlisting the motif of the wounded male, Géricault would imbue
his civilian citizen figures in the Raft of the Medusa with his own inner torment that
included self-doubt, sexual desire and yearning for worldly success. In this instance,
what the artist personally attempted to hide most in life becomes in the painting what is
most powerfully recognised.
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3
Raft of the Medusa
By 1818 Géricault’s artistic development and education was informed as much by his
experience of erasure, betrayal and loss as it was by his formal training. A significant gap
existed between the life Géricault thought he would be leading at the beginning of 1810
and the life he led toward the end of the following decade in 1818.
Being independent of institutional support, Géricault’s artistic development was largely
self-propelled. His Italian work was discussed in the previous chapter. This work was not
done within French Academy walls at Rome, as was the case with previous Neoclassicists David and Girodet. Having failed to qualify for this institution, Géricault
funded the trip himself. When he returned dejected to Paris from Italy in November
1817, he abandoned his Barberi horse race painting for the Salon. After several months
of searching for a new subject he conceives a large Salon painting, the Raft of the
Medusa.
Upon his return from Italy, Géricault also recklessly resumed his secret love affair with
his Aunt Alexandrine-Modeste. This, along with his dejected state, may be the personal
background to a shift that Géricault pioneered in the image of the wounded male. I have
shown in the previous chapter how Géricault had radically reconfigured the motif from
its Neo-classical origins. In this chapter I provide an interpretation of the Raft of the
Medusa that examines how the motif of the wounded male is utilised to explore and
flout expected cultural expectations of the self.
85
Unique for the artist’s time, the vastly ambitious painting of the Raft of the Medusa was,
as noted earlier, also undertaken independently of a formal commission. Géricault was
consequently not constrained by the set content that a patron would have demanded.
Furthermore, given Géricault’s own substantial investment in such a large venture, it is
not surprising that his psychological state pressed more freely on the conception of the
painting. In presenting the wounded male within a Neo-classical framework, Géricault at
once both deferred to, and departed from, Neo-classical iconography. He understood
that the subjective emotions he gave authority to in this painting could only be
comprehended as a wound within the self-sacrificing iconography of French NeoClassicism. Géricault however, departed from Neo-classicism by relinquishing an
overriding civic narrative and foregrounding tender, and sometimes extreme, personal
emotions. By conferring on his figures a tragic heroic authority, Géricault created in the
Raft of the Medusa, a window to his own inner turmoil that was antithetical to an
ideology that required the citizen to forgo personal emotion for the benefit of the
collective whole.
Géricault’s affair with Alexandrine-Modeste was not a slight deviation from governing
codes of conduct but a serious misdemeanour within current Civic Law. When he began
his affair, Alexandrine was married, with two children, to the rich and powerful
businessman, Jean-Baptiste Caruel. Under Napoleon’s Civil Code, which continued into
the Restoration, the family was the base unit of social organisation, with the father as
the unquestionable head of the household.159 Within this context, any disruption of this
159
Colin Jones, C. (1994). Cambridge Illustrated History France, Page 197. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
86
social unit committed by a single male upon a married woman carried severe
consequences. In certain circumstances this included justifiable homicide. 160 This was
not the case for married men who were able to freely have discreet affairs with single
women. In such cases there were few repercussions unless he brought his mistress to
live in the family home. By contrast, the adulterous wife faced imprisonment of up to
two years if convicted.161 In the middle of 1818, soon after Géricault had begun work on
the Raft of the Medusa, Alexandrine-Modeste became pregnant. Through this revelation
Alexandrine-Modeste’s adulterous affair was exposed and Géricault was revealed
dishonourably as the scoundrel that set the Caruel household into complete disarray.
Although Géricault’s and Alexandrine-Modeste’s transgression was a criminal offence
the affair was secretly resolved within the family. Alexandrine-Modeste was sent off to
live in enforced isolation in the country for the rest of her life while Géricault was cut
adrift from the powerful financial connections he once had to the wealth of the Caruel
family.
Such nineteenth-century biographers as Charles Clement knew of an illicit love affair
that had disrupted Géricault’s life, but the faithfulness of his aging friends kept the
details from public scrutiny. Art historians have not fully analysed its consequences on
Géricault’s painting because its enormity was only revealed a century and a half later,
when in 1976 Géricault scholar, Marie Le Pesant, discovered documents that disclosed
the details of what had occurred.162
160
Desan, S. (2004). The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France Suzanne, p.304. California: University of California Press.
Article 324 of the Napoleonic Code absolved the husband of responsibility if he killed his wife or her male lover should he discover
them enflagrant délit in the home.
161
Censer, J.R. and Hunt, L. (2001). Op. cit.p.147.
162
Documents inédits sur Géricault, Revue de l’Art, 31, 1976, p.76.
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If 1818 to 1819 was a prolific period for Géricault, his personal turmoil is evident in the
existential bleakness of the work and its radical break from the jingoism of the Empire.
This is very clear in a remarkable body of lithographic works documenting soldiers of the
Empire returning from the war. Central to this group is the bleak Return from Russia
(1818). This is a particularly challenging print and its small print run demonstrates that it
failed to attract popular interest at the time. Free of the sentimentality and slogan that
typified the lithography of his contemporaries, Vernet and Charlet, Return from Russia
realistically records a pitiful band of defeated soldiers betrayed by the idealism of the
Empire. They are effectively released from the narrative of Empire to which Gros, David,
Girodet and indeed Géricault also had once subscribed. The Emperor is conspicuously
absent in Return from Russia, both in form and inference. The suggestion of rescue by
any external force is absent.
Géricault, Return From Russia (1818).
88
The clear definition of the figures in Return from Russia become powerfully ironic in that
they define an absence, directly echoing Géricault’s own life story. Gone are the days of
French painting when the salvation of wounded soldiers is brought about through the
grace of Napoleon’s touch. In Return from Russia a blinded and maimed officer mounted
on top of an exhausted horse is led by a one armed foot-soldier. The maimed officer
tenderly supports himself by lightly gripping his right hand onto the left shoulder of the
foot soldier.
Through a snowy windswept wasteland, the soldiers slowly venture
forward accompanied by a freezing dog. In the vaporous background, one soldier lifts
and carries another, echoing the gestures of the figures in the foreground. Within the
stillness of this bleak scene with all hope of rescue lost, the soldiers, now relinquished of
their obligations to Empire, still care for each other as human beings. The carefully
delineated folds in the bandages that cover the wounded officer’s arm and face, and the
creases in the coat of the one armed foot soldier who supports him give weight to a
humanitarian narrative where attention to detail becomes, to quote Thomas Laqueur, ‘a
sign of truth.’163
Géricault’s focus on suffering bodies is not simply a morbid inclination but engenders a
sense of compassion.164 The desperate scene presents a moral imperative to undertake
ameliorative action. As Laqueur asserts, ‘the humanitarian narrative relies on the
personal body, not only as the locus of pain but also as the common bond between
163
Laqueur T.W. (1989). ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.’, p.177. Ch. 7 in The New Cultural History. Edited by Lyn
Hunt. California : University of California Press.
164
Ryan, M. (1997). Op.cit. also makes specific reference to Thomas Laqueur’s 1989 essay in her analysis in of Géricault’s drawing
The African Slave Trade (1820).
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those who suffer and those who would help.’165 Unlike the work of his Italian influences,
Raphael, Caravaggio and Michelangelo, Géricault’s work is bereft of religious doctrine
and as such the depiction of human suffering takes on a power and urgency of its own
immediate existential presence. The Empire’s master narrative has been left behind,
lying in tatters in the snowy wasteland from which these soldiers have retreated.
Appearing in the Empire’s uniform the figures are recognisable as soldiers but most of all
men alone in their suffering.
Géricault, Wounded Soldiers in a Cart (1818).
165
Laqueur. T.W. (1989). Op.cit. p. 177.
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Wounded Soldiers in a Cart (1818), like Return from Russia, is a painting that records
wounded and exhausted French soldiers returning from battle. In this painting a
wounded soldier, part Odysseus, part crucified Jesus, is loaded onto a decrepit wagon
already full of soldiers. The painting has strong compositional links to Rescue of the
Survivors (1818), a study Géricault created for the Raft of the Medusa. Both works depict
a suffering male being rescued by a group of men offering support and recovery. In
Wounded Soldiers in a Cart and Rescue of the Survivors Géricault had respectively
utilised accounts of the fall of the Empire and the Medusa tragedy to create narratives
of male intimacy at a time when he personally was suffering shame after being exposed
for his dishonourable adulterous behaviour.
Géricault, Study for Wounded Soldiers in a Cart (1818).
Géricault, Rescue of the Survivors (1818).
Coinciding with this event in 1818 and with the loyal support of his young male
assistants Antoine Monfort, Louis-Alexandre Jamar and François Lehoux, Géricault
withdrew into the seclusion of his studio to create, the Raft of the Medusa. Géricault
had by this time moved from his studio at rue des Martyrs, where he was a neighbour to
Horace Vernet and the high spirited bohemianism of the La Nouvelle Athénes, to larger
and quieter quarters in the Faubourg du Roule. To work on the Raft of the Medusa, his
young assistants, who had only been previously familiar with the boisterous atmosphere
of Vernet’s atelier, were enlisted into a project of intense seriousness.
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Artistically Géricault’s recruitment of young men into his ambitious project had direct
artistic echoes in the supportive male camaraderie that had existed within French NeoClassicism. However David’s studio existed within the spirit of sacrifice to the greater
narrative of the Empire. Géricault’s studio atmosphere had no such public context and
he demanded of his assistants an intimacy that has made several scholars question his
sexuality. My interest here is not to bring into question Géricault’s sexuality or even to
normalise his behaviour within contemporary sexual politics, but rather to note that
Géricault’s behaviour, like his affair with Alexandrine-Modeste, was antithetical to the
governing norms of male citizenship. A spirit of enforced homo-social male relations had
dominated the generation under the Empire with the intention of utilising the isolation
of the sexes for the benefit of the Empire. To a large extent the Restoration continued to
organise society along these lines, recognising that continuing Napoleon’s separation of
the sexes was an effective form of social control.
French Neo-classicism’s predominately male iconography had reflected the Empire’s
governing preference for male homo-sociality. Curiously, even though Neo-classicism
produced Empire paintings with an all male cast, these paintings were not hyper
masculinised versions of reality. Neo-classicism did not reserve feminine and masculine
characteristics to gender. Artists like David, Gros and Girodet had actively sought out
feminine characteristics in their male models portraying them as virtues within either a
Revolutionary or Empire narrative. Though the Empire readily incorporated masculine
and feminine traits in its narrative, within the newly formed Napoleonic Code it viewed
sexual activity between men as a serious offence. It was one thing to readily serve the
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Empire in all manifestations of the male self but another to satisfy one’s sexual desire in
a form that contravened the values sourced from biological imperatives set by the
Enlightenment.166
When Géricault secluded himself into his studio with his young male assistants to paint
the Raft of the Medusa, he demanded of at least one of his assistants an intense
commitment of friendship that seemed to transgress the boundaries of accepted
sexuality. Over a period of a year while working on the Raft of the Medusa, Géricault
would share a small adjoining bedroom with the closest of his male assistants, the
eighteen-year-old Louis-Alexandre Jamar.167 Their friendship was both stormy and
intimate and went far beyond recognised sanctioned male intimacy.168 This was not the
boisterous male camaraderie that Horace Vernet had cultivated in his studio while he
returned to wife and family in the evening.
Though considered a radical by some, Vernet had been prolific and successful in the
Restoration by cleverly satisfying the narcissistic needs of an aging middle class. He
projected a confident self that flattered the once revolutionary class with shallow
patriotic narratives of male solidarity. Within the narrowed opportunities under this
growing gerontocracy, more sensitive and less compliant restless males like Géricault
sought emotional refuge in intimate male relationships.
Géricault’s belief that ‘obstacles and difficulties which repel mediocre men are a
necessity and nourishment to genius’, was a philosophy that worked well for an earlier
166
167
168
Grigsby, D.G. (2002). Op. cit. p.158.
Clement , C.(1879). Op.cit. p. 137.
Christiansen, R. (2000). The Victorian Visitors.,p. 15 provides a lucid description of Géricault’s relationship to Jamar.
93
generation of Neo-classicists who had lived through difficult times and had managed to
secure opportunities within the emergent Empire.169 David spent much of 1794 in prison
before being released to find a major patron for his painting in Napoleon. 170 David’s
student Gros, after suffering starvation for four months in Genoa in 1800, would
subsequently return to Paris where the Empire would ultimately recognise his talents
with substantial prizes.171 The Restoration was different, a peaceful environment that
was more permissive than the Empire but constrained by laws that worked to actively
favour an aging and wealthy bourgeois. These laws in turn disenfranchised a younger
ambitious male cohort, who had only been made more restless by the opportunity
education provided them. Géricault’s personal philosophy, which considered external
circumstances of poverty and persecution as a form of nourishment, cultivated a
personal environment, for many, grew stranger every day as the Raft of the Medusa
unfolded. Delacroix, who had posed for the prostrate male figure with Jamar as the
seated figure next to him, would at a later date near the painting’s completion recall
that he was so confronted by what he saw that he fled, running from the artist’s studio.
Delacroix commented, ‘The impression it gave me was so strong that as I left the studio I
broke into a run, and kept running like a fool.’172
In the Raft of the Medusa, a group of twenty men are depicted stranded on a raft. Five
of these seem dead or near death. A classically influenced cycle of loss and renewal can
be deciphered within this scene of shipwreck. Like the classical friezes in the Louvre
169
Eitner, L. (1983). Op. cit. p. 270.
Monneret, S.(1999). Op. cit. p. 121.
171
O’Brien, D. (2006). Op. cit. p. 48.
172
Eitner, L. (1983). Op. cit. p. 179.
170
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which Géricault had copied in 1816, this enormous five metre by seven metre canvas of
strained muscular figures can be read from left to right. Beginning at the lower left of
the picture and then travelling upwards diagonally to the right, the narrative’s climax is
reached at the apex located to the right of the canvas. The action then drops down from
this apex and continues like an epilogue that tracks slowly back to its original point.
Géricault, detail of the Raft of the Medusa (1819).
The cyclical journey of the Raft of the Medusa begins with the fallen naked young man in
the foreground of the painting. Held by an elderly figure the youth’s open left hand
appears to beckon, as if asking for a service fee for the privilege of gazing at this
carnivalesque spectacle of suffering and exaltation. The elderly figure’s relationship to
the youth appears initially father-like but, upon further contemplation, his intentions
95
look ominous and threatening. In the deep shadow thrown by this couple, immediately
to the right, is a half reclining male, his head in profile, wrapped in a green bandana. As
this male leans on his right arm for support, his shirt slips from his body to expose a
muscular left shoulder. This reclining figure is far from relaxed with an anxious open
mouth, the muscles of his right shoulder taut and his legs defensively drawn into his
body. By following the right turn of the head of this dark figure the narrative continues
to a group of beautifully intertwining arrangement of three mature males. Two clothed,
bearded figures surge upwards whilst supporting the efforts of a struggling third figure,
naked except for a knotted scarf worn around his neck. They gaze upward, all eyes
directing their attention toward a triad of figures that form an apex. Viewed from the
back, three figures balance precariously on an arrangement of wine barrels. The figure
on the left, a man shrouded in a red turban, supports the uppermost figure in his arms, a
dark muscular male who frantically waves a red and white cloth to signal a distant ship.
As he signals the left side of his brown back shimmers with golden highlights thrown by
the sun low on the horizon. The young cabin boy to the right, hair tossed by the wind,
leans his back onto the knee of this central apical figure for support and in doing so
stabilises the figure’s ascension. The young cabin boy is also signalling excitedly out to
sea with a white cloth. The boy’s lower half lies unsteadily on the horizontal wine barrel.
This wine barrel is already partially submerged in seawater and, because of its horizontal
position, threatens to literally roll off the raft into the ocean with the boy in tow. A
steadying hand of the shirtless figure below him reaches and grips the boy’s thigh. There
is a suggested ambivalence here that perhaps this shirtless figure is really not providing
any support to the signalling boy and that his hold is simply an aid to secure a place of
prominence on the raft.
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Directly beneath the drama of this apex of figures, the focus falls onto an unconscious
African below them. Couched on the thigh of the shirtless figure the African initially
appears harmless. However this perception changes when we recognise that the object
lying next to him is a bloodstained axe. The axe recalls the documented reports of
violence that surround the tragedy and the painting now reflects an anxious double
meaning. Is the African simply resting or are his motives more deceptive?
Géricault, detail of The Raft of the Medusa (1819).
From here the focus of the painting slips further down the canvas to a corpse seductively
covered in a transparently wet, ghostly sheet. Sliding off the raft, the shrouded corpse’s
upturned body creates an animal-like presence where his thighs strangely resemble a
horse’s hind legs. As the corpse becomes submerged in the ocean and slips out of the
frame, the bony and ragged left knee of its thigh points to a supine figure in the centre
97
of the raft. His head, resting between the knee of the figure in deep shadow and the
outstretched hand of the dead young man, completes a circle that consists of thirteen
members. Géricault has constructed a great evolving machine of humanity whose
protagonists surge forward with an effort that is continually reinvigorated by their
churning.
There are another seven figures whose actions reinforce the Raft of the Medusa’s
cyclical narrative by providing crucial footnotes to this drama. To the far left there
appears to be a gruesome upper fragment of a soldier taking in his final gasp of air. His
pale hairless torso rests on a dated Napoleonic uniform that he would have once
proudly worn. Partially submerged, the soldier’s right arm appears to fester in oceanwater. The prominent nose of this figure leads in an upward direction to the large wave
just above him. This wave threatens to break upon and engulf this fallen warrior and
wash him into the ocean.
At the base of the looming wave, the highlighted side of a freely flapping piece of canvas
leads into the dark recesses of a makeshift tent. Two crouching figures are located at the
base of the tent next to the mast. They both appear to have succumbed to the dreaded
seafaring disease associated with deprivation and exposure, calenture. Of the two, the
lower figure is represented as especially desperate with his hands clasping or clawing his
forehead, attempting perhaps to get a grip on the reality that is fading from him.
Directly above these two desperate figures is a group of four men. Two of these figures,
the bearded figure in shadow and the pointing figure, have been identified respectively
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as the raft survivors Savigny and Corread, authors Naufrage de la frégate Méduse
(1817), which documents in detail the Medusa shipwreck and the ordeal of the raft
survivors. Published in November 1817 in the wake of the aftershock of political scandal
generated by the free press, Géricault freely sourced some aspects of this text and
discarded others.173
Géricault, detail of The Raft of the Medusa (1819).
Two other crewmembers are represented in the painting between Savigny and Corread.
The first, on the left, is a blond haired figure identified as Jamar,174 Géricault’s young
assistant during the painting of the Raft of the Medusa. On first examination his hands
appear clasped in prayer. On closer inspection the two hands reveal that they are in fact
three hands. Savigny has moved his left arm inside Jamar’s right arm, interlocking his left
hand with Jamar’s right hand. Over Savigny’s left hand, Jamar has also laid his left hand.
173
Géricault configures the ascending apical figures from an incident described in Naufrage de la frégate Méduse, a scene not
mentioned in newspaper reports. However the artist discards the fact that Corread shown in the painting fully conscious was
stretchered off in delirium in the book.
174
Eitner, L. (1983). Op. cit. p. 205.
99
Around the wrists of this set of interwoven hands, the last figure of this group, an
African, has interlocked his hands. This bouquet of five intertwined hands can be
interpreted as a 19th century gesture of universal brotherhood reflecting the common
humanitarian interests that Géricault shared with Corread and Savigny.
The Raft of the Medusa’s narrative circle and the accompanying visual footnotes that I
have described, provide a framework to interpret its overriding themes of generational
maturation and change that predominated post-Napoleonic France. The Raft of the
Medusa projects a life cycle of loss and renewal that is propelled by the need for
recognition by a younger cohort. The sequenced action moves from an inactive group of
elderly and wounded figures on the left of the canvas representing the immediate past,
to a group of restless mature young men in the centre, frustrated in their ascension,
articulating the painful present, to finally an even more youthful group of excited
individuals who press against the vastness and emptiness in front of them.
Géricault leaves these scenes open to multiple readings. In doing so the Raft of the
Medusa undermines any determined effort to formulate a final reading. Nonetheless the
painting demands a personal reading, as the very ambivalence of meaning disallows the
viewer from taking a safe theatrical distance. The viewer is compelled by the very
complexity and intricacies of the drama to navigate the maze of scenes and their
inherent ambiguities. A multiplicity of interpretations emerges from this process. This
makes the viewing the Raft of the Medusa deeply experiential and performative.
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In the dark recesses of the Raft of the Medusa, obscured by the bitumen encrusted
pigment, are the crushed uniforms, old swords and other military trappings, including
that much used Napoleonic medal of heroism, the Legion of Honour. These props
supplied the Empire narrative of his previous three Salon paintings, The Charging
Chasseur (1812), The Wounded Cuirassier (1814) and the lost Artillery Manoeuvre in the
Plain of Grenelle (1814). Like metamorphosing insects, the vulnerable sparingly clothed
figures in the Raft of the Medusa have now shed the hard martial skin that was their
trademark in these earlier Salon works. In this context the Raft of the Medusa’s
protagonists appear like pale raw chrysalides, both vulnerable and strangely erotic.
Without the previous armatures to support and protect them, they beckon, wrestle, and
grasp for an unknown future that might facilitate their maturation.
If, from a purely stylistic point of view, Romantic Art grew out of and was a reaction to
Neo-Classicism,175 at a deeper level – the level of psychic motivation – Romanticism was
a reaction and development by the artist in response to the demands and
responsibilities of being a citizen in an emergent modern society. This is why the
visionary breadth of the Raft of the Medusa can include and transcend the painting’s
two most common, albeit contrasting interpretations, namely as a vague Romantic work
of man challenged by nature, and a timely specifically liberal narrative constructed
around criticism of the limited freedoms the individual had under the Restoration.
Géricault existed in a culture where both ‘nature’ and the ‘individual’ had been recently
reconstructed and re-interpreted within French Enlightenment terms in which the
175
Vaughan, W. (1978).Romantic Art, p.11. London: Thames & Hudson. Rosen, C. & Zerner, H. (1971). Romanticism and Realism,
p.24.London: Faber & Faber. Rosenblum,R. & Janson, H.W. (1984). Op. cit. p.118.
101
benchmark for normality was procreative order. The normative rights and
responsibilities of the individual were determined by what was considered natural and
un-natural behaviour. The Raft of the Medusa on the other hand, challenges these
assumptions by presenting an extreme state of isolation in the natural world that
severely tests prescribed ‘natural’ behaviours.
While the Medusa shipwreck was a naval disaster largely involving military personnel,
the Raft of the Medusa gives only vague suggestions that the protagonists in this
painting were once soldiers of France. The Raft of the Medusa’s figures are without
military hierarchy and exist as individuals first, who are judged against the testing
extremes of nature. On the other hand, these individuals are not without obligation to
each other. As I have argued, Géricault constructs from their existential dread a
humanitarian social bond. Instilled in his figures, albeit in complex presentation, is the
heroic formulation of the citizen’s struggle for recognition.
Spurred on by the Enlightenment, the citizen was like a numberless dice that had been
cast by the revolution. Modifying the citizen’s freedoms, the Empire then chiselled the
various characteristic numbers on the dice’s sides through the fulfilment of civic
requirements. Under Napoleon every working male carried a numbered card that
provided information on his current and previous work history. This citizen figure,
created by the new Republic, was not removed with the restoration of Louis XVIII. The
battle for territories was over with Napoleon’s demise but the citizens’ responsibilities
continued as a feature of everyday existence enshrined under the Napoleonic Code.
Accompanying these responsibilities were the growing demands for expanding rights
102
and privileges. Louis XVIII’s Charter of 1814 was constructed within the knowing
awareness of the impossibility of going back to the Ancient Regime. For society to
develop the administration of the state was now irretrievably linked to the aspirations of
its citizens. In the ensuing decades the gamble for political rights and the accompanying
debt of responsibilities would become the identifiable historical watermark for
Géricault’s cohort. The model of the self-regulating middle class male citizen is taken for
granted now, his obligations and entitlements invisibly pervading modernity. However
this was not the case in the early decades of the nineteenth-century as the French male
citizen, a product of the Revolution of 1789, surged forward within society struggling for
individual recognition.
The heroic male citizen’s struggle was not without personal sacrifice and, as Géricault so
masterfully pictures, ambivalence. In the Raft of the Medusa the citizen figure is just as
restricted and wounded by his own ‘natural’ responsibilities as he is empowered by his
surging demand for rights. The relationship the citizen figure has to the wounded male is
complex and goes far deeper than simply the struggle for political recognition and
meeting civic obligations. It also speaks of the invisibility of unkempt emotions
generated and put in abeyance to fully comply with these obligations - as if
foreshadowing the psychic struggles of civilisation and its discontents that is the centre
of Freud’s discourse.
As was argued earlier, throughout his life Géricault had struggled with, but was also
driven by, the aspirations of the new identity that is the citizen. Overcoming private
feeling for public duty was an obligatory requirement for the new citizen. The
103
honourable self-regulating, natural behaviour that eighteenth-century Enlightenment
writers like Rousseau176 and Voltaire177 instilled in this figure is countered by the
extreme emotion that became manifest in Géricault’s life and work.
The Raft of the Medusa is a painting imbued with tormented, unconscious sexual
desires. In this instance what the artist personally attempts to hide most in life becomes,
in the painting, what is most powerfully recognised. In Chapter Two I drew attention to
the division of themes that had been created by Géricault between his Italian works on
paper and works in oils. In the works on paper, themes of sexual gratification
predominate, whereas in his oils the subject is a desire for worldly success. These
divergent but linked themes disturbingly converge in the Raft of the Medusa, troubling
his attempts to marginalise what was obviously a central concern and motivation in his
life.
An accepted Salon convention of early nineteenth-century oil painting was for the young
naked male to be depicted as a passive object of desire situated in antiquity, as in
Guerin’s 1811 painting Aurora and Cephalus. The generation that was once
revolutionary in 1789 was now a comfortable and aging bourgeois class, who in 1811
could spy guiltlessly on the unconscious naked body of Cephalus in Guerin’s painting,
reflecting the conceit of their own wealth and power. In the Raft of the Medusa
Géricault transforms this image of the slumbering young male by extinguishing all life
from his once Revolutionary body and placing him in the arms of an elderly figure. In
doing so Géricault foresees the gerontocracy that would ultimately mark this period
176
Rousseau, J. Discourse on Inequality (1754). Republished 2004, London : Dover Publications. Emile or, On Education (1762).
Republished 1993, Canada: J.M.Dent & Sons.
177
Voltaire (1764), Philosophical Dictionary. Republished 1979, London: Penguin Books.
104
whereby young men faced constant frustration under an older authority. 178 To further
infuriate Neo-classical convention he paints another young naked male, located in the
centre of the Raft of the Medusa, as an active agent of desire, beckoning fulfilment
within a contemporary event. This scene functions as an act of provocation, highlighting
the spent promise of liberty made by a mellowing generation of the Revolution to a
post-Revolutionary generation now in restless maturation.
Guérin, Aurora and Cephalus (1810).
For Géricault, the motif of the wounded male - and his earlier cousin, the fallen figure represented the sexually active male flung out into the world but denied the potency of
action. The close examination of Géricault’s treatment of desire over the three-year
period of 1815 to 1818 (in Chapter 2) demonstrated that he understood the eroticised
178
Hemmings, F.W.J. (1987)., p.128: ‘.the net result was that the young saw the country being run by and for the rich middle aged and
elderly. The resentment of the disenfranchised accounts in no small measure for the underlying instability of the restoration regime.
It is significant that the word gerontocratie appears for the first time in the French language in the 1820s.’
105
male as a wound in the wider artistic context of Neo-classicist convention. Géricault’s
extravagant erotic displays in his Italian works on paper could only be conveyed to a
wider Salon audience by reconfiguring this eroticism as a wound that ruptured this
schema. Without seeming to overtly contravene these values, Géricault casts the
eroticised male’s yearning for physical intimacy and wholeness in the world within a
wounded heroic role. Many of Géricault’s classicised figures centrally located on the Raft
of the Medusa exhibit a suppressed yearning to be in the world that simultaneously
engages and cripples them. In particular, I suggest, the psychological trauma of
cannibalism becomes a suitable metaphor for the plight of Géricault’s own sexual
frustration that at the same moment propels and disables.179
Géricault, Detail of The Raft of the Medusa (1819).
179
For other erotic interpretations of the Raft of the Medusa see Germer , S. “On the Origin of Géricault’s Fantasy of Origins” &
Nochlin, L. “Géricault or the Absence of Women” in Michel, R. (Ed.) (1996). Op. cit.
106
Beneath the suggestion of cannibalism in the Raft of the Medusa is a disturbing sexual
tautology, an account of flesh that is both motivated and held in abeyance by an
attraction to the flesh. Seamlessly intertwined with a psychological need to willingly be
in the world through wider erotic engagement, the figures’ guilt over their own
sexualised physiology disables them. Géricault’s painting can be understood on the
surface as a dramatic story of shipwreck but reveals on closer inspection a disturbing
scene of male sexual sublimation. Like cannibalism, the erect phallus was also a
forbidden subject in Salon painting. Nevertheless Géricault draws attention to the erect
phallus in the Raft of the Medusa via an implied debilitating presence that highlights the
protagonists’ sexual needs. In the Raft of the Medusa the disabling potency of the erect
phallus suggested in the three central protagonists unites and alienates them from their
colleagues. The half-reclining figure in deep shadow, his face seen in profile, the
prostrate figure below him cited earlier and the rising naked figure diagonally above, are
captured in a frozen moment suggesting both expansive yearning and contracted inertia.
In a gesture of sexual frustration, the wounded shadow figure appears to be pressing
down on his hidden phallus, ultimately offering only minimal comfort to his crippling
predicament. The prostrate figure below him appears to have had his resources spent
and has now resigned himself to his own unconscious liberation. The third rising figure
diagonally to the right sublimates his erotic desire by appearing to fold his penis in
transvestite fashion between his legs and pretending that it simply is not there.
107
David, The Death of Bara (1794).
The French Neo-classical merging of personal emotion and public duty sourced from
Enlightenment values are being reconfigured in these figures with an emphasis on the
former. Thinly disguised, these well-nourished figures demonstrate that it is not
starvation that has crippled the protagonists call to public duty but personal emotion. An
older less ideological but just as eroticised version of the ecstatic dying boy in David’s
The Death of Bara (1794) and the spear injured young man in Drouais’ The Wounded
Warrior (1785), is being reshaped and moulded for a more compromised time. The
Death of Bara, in which the undercurrent of eroticism was once a symbol of
revolutionary freedom, is now being reworked with the hindsight of history in an era of
emergent nineteenth-century liberal relativism.
In the second decade of the nineteenth century the liberating desires of the previous
period were increasingly placated by paid labour. Revolutionary desires were now being
cut off from the disruptive ideas of liberty and increasingly channelled into the widening
needs of commerce. The growing presence of an expanding middle class diverted the
108
quest for liberty into aspirations for greater commodities and services.180 Within this
surging materialism, desire was derailed from its original visionary and revolutionary
source to be increasingly seen as a commodity that could be bargained for and attained
with the right price.
Were these events crippling the figure of liberty or were they the logical development of
an impractical ideal? Certainly nineteenth-century liberals like Benjamin Constant would
see the revolution and the permanently changed society it created not so much as a
product of ideals, as earlier ideologues argued, but the inevitable evolution of
modernity.181 The apparent sexual confusion in the Raft of the Medusa that bridges
pressing sexual freedom and the issues of nineteenth-century liberalism may initially
appear unrelated. However evidence exists that this was an issue for men of this era. In
an effort to deal with growing male tensions, the Saint-Simonian socialist philosopher
Prosper Enfantin dreamed in 1832 of a ‘beautiful army’ of prostitutes destined to
sanctify the needs of the flesh by fulfilling natural desire.182 This movement, which was
later banned for cultivating anti-establishment philosophies, demonstrates the early
attempts to alleviate growing male sexual discontent within liberal politics.183
The dual ambivalence regarding citizenship that pervades the Raft of the Medusa
ultimately reaches a climax in its depiction of the apical African figure that features in
the upper right of the painting. In 1845 Charles Blanc asks;
180
Jardin, A. and Tudesq, A-J. (1983) . op.cit.p. 381. The middle class was estimated to be 16.2% in 1820.
Artz. F. B. (1966). Op. cit, p. 59.
182
Eisenman, S. (1994)., op. cit. p.203.
183
Chenique, B .(1997). On the Far Left of Géricault, p.76., in Guilbaut, S., Ryan, M. & Watson, S. (Eds.), Théodore Géricault The Alien
Body: Tradition in Chaos. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. ,contends that Géricault had access to Saint-Simonian
philosphy through his friend Auguste Brunet.
181
109
Is it not a negro who is painted on top of the canvas, running out to make
signals with shreds of drapery? But what! This negro is no longer in the hold,
and he will save the crew! Is it not admirable that this great misfortune has
restored equality amongst the two races?
The presence of the African has been repeatedly interpreted as an abolitionist
statement. Berger goes one step further to assert that Géricault ‘found in the Negro a
concrete symbol through which he could make clear his perspective on the world.’184
Indeed, there is enough evidence to suggest that Géricault had, to paraphrase Blanc,
abolition at the back of his mind when he raised the African to the apex of his figures.
However, Géricault’s intentions, as with the rest of the painting are not likely to be so
single-minded.
Significantly, as Maureen Ryan has pointed out, when Géricault exhibited his painting
the radical press found the conspicuous absence of identifiable clothing one of the most
frustrating aspects of the painting.185 The abolitionists were men of the Enlightenment,
and central to their cause was the need to civilise the African slave. As Corread and
Savigny write at the end of their Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal 1818 edition, the
abolition of slavery,
was the only means which the Europeans have left to become acquainted
with the interior of this vast continent, and to make this great portion of the
family of mankind, by which it is inhabited, participate in the benefits of
civilization.
184
Berger, K. (1955). Op.cit. p. 27.
Ryan,M. (1997). op. cit. p. 34. The journalist in the liberal Le Censeur europeén wrote on the 29 August, ‘One sees there only a
heap of men...This raft is covered with a crowd of unfortunates, almost all nude, with nothing to indicate what is their nation or their
status.’185 The critic in the moderate Journal de Paris wrote that, ‘The author, however, has not found it necessary to indicate either
the nation or the rank of these figures.’185 The writer in the liberal Revue encycloédique, volume 4 (1819) states the Raft of the
Medusa is a painting of, ‘a pile of bodies that repulses the eye.’ Eitner, L. (1983). op. cit. also makes this point on p.199.
185
110
As a consequence, nineteenth-century abolitionist images displayed images of the freed
slave in the conventional attire of the respectable French citizen, the necessary external
conversion that abolitionists recognised in support of their cause. In the Raft of the
Medusa, the African’s figure’s beautiful bare back and ragged pants did little to support
the abolitionist cause. At the time, the apical figure had in fact only been recognised as
African by one reviewer but this was only in passing and not related to the abolitionist
cause.186 Géricault’s image can be contrasted with what is the most powerful image of
abolition in French Post-Revolutionary French Painting, Girodet’s C(itizen) Jean-Baptiste
Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies (1797). Here the Haitian Belley wears all the
attire of an honourable French citizen, accompanied by an explicit reference to the
civilising values of Enlightenment. The bust that Belley so casually leans against is of
eighteenth-century French philosopher, Guillaume Raynal.187
Géricault was sensitive to the abolitionist cause, which arguably is why he positioned
the African at the apex of figures, but his departure from conventional abolitionist
iconography, especially that which so transparently reiterated the ideology of radical
Enlightenment, was motivated by his ambivalence towards wholly containing a heroic
identity within the normative role of the citizen. It is quite possible that Géricault, a
great admirer of Girodet’s work, was making an ironic reference to abolition via an
interesting similarity that exists between the apical figure and Girodet’s painting of
Belley. The red and white cloth that the African waves to gain recognition in the Raft of
186
Jal.G. (1819). L’Ombre Diderot et le Bossu du Marais, p.123., cited in Ryan, M. (1997). ibid. p. 48.
Womack, W. (1972). The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Language association, Vol. 26, No. 3, Guillaume Raynal and the
Eighteenth-Century Cult of the Noble Savage, pp.98-107. Raynal believed that the human could reach his ultimate evolutionary
development through finding a golden mean between the deprivations of savagery and the excesses of civilisation.
187
111
the Medusa resembles in part, the tri-colour sash that Bellay proudly wears around his
waist as a sign of his citizenship.
Girodet, Jean-Baptiste Belley (1797).
Géricault’s African however emphasises the heroic deregulation of identity rather than
signs of citizenship. Unlike Belley, ultimate freedom in the Raft of the Medusa is not
represented as an integration of noble values of the savage with the urbane intelligence
of the citizen.
112
Géricault, oil study for the Raft of the Medusa (1819).
The wild muscular asymmetrical back in Géricault’s painting demonstrates that one’s
desires have shredded the garments that had provided the identifying hallmarks of the
citizen. Pre-empting later nineteenth-century Orientalism, the African’s projected
otherness asserts the importance of fulfilling one’s primeval needs through spontaneous
action. The individual’s own freedom takes precedence over following regulatory signs
and expected conventions. Certainly Géricault’s depiction of the African could be
criticised within post-colonial theory as projecting a set of values which might not have
existed in African cultures. Whether or not Géricault was deluding himself, there was
nevertheless a clear intention by him to portray in his African protagonist a heroic
existential freedom beyond the then ultimate accepted figure of French freedom, the
citizen. In this sense, the tortured and restless wounded male figures on the Raft of the
Medusa, activated with emotions that represent our most innermost desires, arguably
provide us with the most convincing vision of freedom.
113
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Géricault`s Wounded Male

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