Ribner on Boariu (2024)

In Paris, on 28 July 1835, King Louis-Philippe reviewed the Garde Nationale accompanied by his sons and notables of the government and military. The occasion was the fifth anniversary of the revolution that elevated the Orléans duke to the throne. Suddenly, a weapon comprising a row of twenty-five gun barrels mounted on a wooden chassis showered ammunition—sixteen of the barrels fired—from a third-story window of 50, boulevard du Temple. Casualty figures vary; according to the book under review, nineteen died and twenty-nine were wounded. Maréchal Édouard Mortier, a pair with a distinguished revolutionary and imperial military record, was preeminent among the fatalities. His forehead grazed by a projectile, Louis-Philippe continued the review.

Neither Republican nor Bonapartist, the perpetrator was a fame-seeking Corsican with a checkered past as convict and imperial hero: Giuseppe Fieschi. Quickly apprehended, he was tried before the Cour des Pairs and guillotined along with two militant Republican accomplices: Théodore Pépin, who financed construction of la Machine infernale, and Pierre Morey, who suggested murdering the king. If vaguely motivated, the lethal plot had decisive political consequences, bringing to a crescendo the chronically bloody conflict between the regime and its discontents that troubled the decade’s first half. In those years, Louis-Philippe and his ministers were insulted with brilliant cruelty by Honoré Daumier and fellow contributors to the satirical journals La Caricature and Le Charivari. Following the attempted assassination, the government retaliated (September 1835) with draconian legislation that terminated the golden age of French political satire.

Though a salient episode of the July Monarchy, the attentat Fieschi had not previously received the exhaustive attention that Dominic-Alain Boariu accords in Roi et régicide: Satire, peinture et politique sous la Monarchie de Juillet. If unnamed in the title, Fieschi is nearly ubiquitous in its pages. Boariu ambitiously seeks to impose order on a vast constellation of words and images surrounding the crime and its intended victim. Enlivened by witty turns of phrase, the argument has a density that demands the reader’s sustained effort.

Divided into two parts (“Roi” and “Régicide”), each comprising multiple subsections, the book is conceived as “un diptyque unissant indéfectiblement le roi et l’envers du roi, d’un dialogue entre une tête couronnée et une tête coupée, entre une tête de poire et une tête allumée" (14). The “tête de poire” is that of the monarch, mocked by caricaturists as the Pear King, for Louis-Philippe’s mutton-chopped, jowly head was indeed pear-like. “Jouez avec le feu” and “Rex ex machina,” subsections of “Roi,” consider visual and verbal assaults on the king in the satirical press. Foreshadowing the physical violence on the Boulevard du Temple, this dark humor contrasts with manifestations of official grief (covered in “Essuyer les larmes, laver le sang”) following the attentat. Coldly indifferent toward the Church at the start of his rule, Louis-Philippe acquired an aura of Catholic sanctity in the wake of his seemingly providential escape. The Legitimist archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen—hardly an admirer of Louis-Philippe—attributed Fieschi’s act to Satan and said mass during the victims’ funeral at the Invalides. Having addressed the sacred music performed there and on the following day at Notre-Dame, the author discusses the king’s transformation of the palace of Versailles into a museum of French history that set forth the July Monarchy’s heroic, patriotic lineage. Emphasizing the politically-expedient, creative volition informing Louis-Philippe’s patronage, Boariu characterizes him as a “roi-artiste” (137). 

Much of the book’s second half pertains to the crime’s aftermath. In “Le grand atelier” Boariu considers a fascinating series of portraits of Fieschi made by attendees at the trial, including Daumier and the pair and former student of Jacques-Louis David, Frédéric-Christophe d’Houdetot. Such, the author explains, was the chilling vanity of the celebrity defendant, that he expressed preference among his portraitists and proudly asserted that his autograph was in wide demand. Following the executions (savored by a wealthy lion, Charles II, duc de Brunswick), the severed heads were brought to Bicêtre—both prison and mad house—so that casts could be made. Fieschi’s head was painted by three artists prior to being autopsied for study and visual recording of the excised brain. In London, a French entrepreneur, A. Bouveiron, exhibited (in 1835) reconstructions based on the crime. Paying visitors could view an effigy of Fieschi igniting la Machine infernale and then see him in captivity. The following year, the murderer and his deadly contrivance entered the catalogue of Madame Marie Tussaud’s waxworks.

Boariu’s research and erudition are formidable. Yet, hesitation to exclude any finding, even if tangential, fosters digression. And appetite for theory is indulged at the expense of clarity and historical specificity. Two contiguous subsections of “Régicide” exemplify these tendencies. Fieschi’s severed head was painted by Jacques Raymond Brascassat, who specialized in depicting animals, particularly wolves. Pursuing this tenuous link between Fieschi and wolves in “‘Un Loup peu délicat,’” the author engages, among other topics, discussion of Brascassat’s wolf paintings by nineteenth-century French art critics; references by Homer and Euripides to Dolon, a Trojan spy who disguised himself as a wolf; and—more germane to Fieschi—anthropomorphic representation of wolf criminality in Jean-Jacques Grandville’s illustrations to Émile Gigault de la Bédollière’s “Cour criminelle de Justice Animale” in the collection Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (1841–42). Whether these references are pertinent is not clarified by Jacques Derrida’s assertion that, due to their common state of being outside the law, “il y a entre le souverain, le criminel et la bête une sorte d’obscure et fascinante complicité, voire une inquiétante attraction mutuelle” (331). Wolves remain at center stage throughout the following subsection (“Race et classe”), where the “inconscient iconographique” is invoked to justify discerning “dans le loup un crypto-portrait de Fieschi” (351). While the relentlessly ramified information is interesting, it overwhelms, rather than supports, the author’s claim. Notwithstanding the difficulty of navigating this lengthy book, Boariu deserves praise for having crafted a wide-ranging and impressively documented study around a single horrifying event.