Powers on Rose (2024)

Jordan Marc Rose’s recent monograph on the relationship between politics and visual art in mid-nineteenth century France is a fascinating look at how artists dealt with shifting revolutionary alliances during the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. Taking Eugène Delacroix’s seminal La Liberté guidant le people (1831) as his point of departure, Rose focuses primarily on lesser-known works, each one attempting in its own way to make sense of the political context of its creation. If Delacroix’s Liberté has provided us with a legible—although far from simple—visual representation of the Trois Glorieux (27, 28, and 29, July 1830), the paintings in Rose’s corpus must grapple with the more complicated (and less glorious) revolutionary moments of 1834 and 1848. Rose discusses one such work in each of the book’s four chapters.

In chapter one, “Trivial and Terrible Reality,” Rose focuses on Honoré Daumier’s (in)famous lithograph Rue Transnonain (1834), memorializing the tragic and irresponsible massacre of seventeen workers, women, and children, mistaken for armed revolutionaries in April 1834. Daumier, whose imagination for mocking Louis Philippe in coded and witty ways seemed limitless, now produced a humorless image that “concealed nothing,” laying bare the artist’s despondency (40). For Rose, the work is especially interesting against the backdrop of the Salon of 1834, where paintings by pro-regime artists like Horace Vernet were portraying a revolutionary ideal of the barricade where, thanks to an established symbolic language, order and revolution were one and the same. In contrast, Daumier’s lithograph could only be read for what it was: a grotesque depiction of senseless murder. The highly mediatized tragedy that took place on the rue Transnonain allowed art critics to draw parallels between the government’s incoherent policies and the “middling art” that such leadership inspired, and for Rose, this brings to light the startling originality and superiority of Daumier’s ruthless image (30).  

In the book’s second chapter, “This is Not a Program,” Rose turns to another work from 1834, Auguste Préault’s relief sculpture, Tuerie. He focuses on the work’s “fragmentary” nature (a quality that the artist himself embraced) as the sculptor’s way of trying to make sense of the government’s senseless violence. Rose masterfully identifies and analyses the many artistic and historical references in the work, concluding that, despite such vivid allusions, “the relief refuses to coalesce” (54). The piece was selected for the Salon of 1834 in order to demonstrate precisely what sculpture should not do, but it was so remarkable that it received a second life, when it was cast in bronze and re-exhibited at the Salon of 1851. Now critics saw it as the embodiment of not one but two moments of revolutionary fervor, that of 1834, but also that of 1848. Nonetheless, on the eve of Napoleon’s coup d’etat, there was little appetite for the reckless rebellion it seemed to call for.     

In the third chapter, “A Monstrous Pile of Men and Stone,” Rose turns his attention to Ernest Meissonier’s small oil painting titled Souvenir de guerre civile (1849–50), depicting one scene from the bloody June Days (22–26 June 1848) witnessed by the artist. Here, we see the return of Delacroix’s barricades (absent in Rue Transnonain and Tuerie), but now, says Rose, they become “a site of failure if not futility” (73). As many people saw the June protesters as ungrateful for what the Provisional Government of the Second Republic had done for them (namely universal suffrage and the National Workshops), barricades had come to represent “a regressive form of unreasonable criminal violence” (80). To better understand the significance of Souvenir, Rose traces the changes made to the work between the summer of 1848 (when it was hastily painted in watercolor) and the winter of 1850 (when Meissonier submitted his oil-painting version to the Salon). Whereas the watercolor expresses “tremulousness” (88), betraying the artist’s uncertainty about the moral significance of the event, the oil painting’s perfect attention to detail captures a near-photographic depiction of reality but lacks any moral positioning. Whatever trace of revolutionary spirit Meissonier had embraced immediately following the June Days, he had completely given it up by 1850. 

In his final chapter, “Between Past and Future,” Rose returns to Daumier, who, in the late 1840s, had begun to focus on painting. His fairly large oil-on-canvas composition L’Émeute was probably created at around the same time that Meissonier was sketching his watercolor Souvenir, but Daumier’s work offers a more dynamic—if not more hopeful—view of revolution. The caricaturist, who had spent much of his career lampooning Louis Philippe, now wanted to support the government rather than criticize it. He was given the opportunity to do so in March 1848, when the Ministry of the Interior called for paintings to provide the new republic with an iconography that would distinguish it from earlier regimes. Daumier’s innovative La République, which reimagines the nation as a mother nursing two children, did just that, employing allegory to communicate a simple but powerful message: “The Republic nourishes and instructs” (118). L’Émeute, painted just a few months later (through careful archival research, Rose has been able to place the origin of this undated work between June and October 1848), sends a different message, however. As Rose notes, the painting conveys an intense sense of conflict, the forward movement of the revolutionary crowd coming up against the edges of the painting itself. Unlike Delacroix’s Liberté, whose protagonists step out of the painting’s frame, Daumier’s L’Émeute limits the potential of revolutionary action.

Throughout the monograph, Rose’s analyses of image and text show his in-depth knowledge of nineteenth-century art history, and his careful arguments are informed by dialectical thinking. An astute scholar of Marx (whose Class Struggles in France provides the book with its opening idea) and the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin are cited throughout), Rose urges his readers to hold the same antithetical truths about politics and culture that his artists had to grapple with. In this way, the book offers a particularly fruitful approach to understanding this paradoxical chapter in French history, and scholars of literature, visual culture, and history will likely find it worth their time.