The Gamin de Paris in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

Delacroix, Hugo, and the French Social Imaginary

Marilyn R. Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315315942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugène Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830, 1832, 1848, 1871) and of masculine, bourgeois identity constructions that responded to continuing struggles over visions and fantasies of nationhood. With the destabilization of traditional, patriarchal family models, the diminishing of the father's symbolic role, and the intensification of the brotherly urchin's psychosexual relationship with the allegorical motherland, what had initially been socially marginal eventually became symbolically central in classed and gendered inventions and repeated re-inventions of "fraternity, " "people, " and "nation." Within a fundamentally split conception of "the people, " the bohemian boy insurrectionary, an embodiment of freedom, was transformed by ongoing discourses of power and reform, of victimization and agency, into a capitalist entrepreneur, schoolboy, colonizer, and budding military defender of the fatherland. A contested figure of the city became a contradictory emblem of the nation.

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Revolutionary Ancestors of the Gamin de Paris

The nineteenth-century deployment of a boy as revolutionary agent and emblem traces its roots back to the Great Revolution of 1789, and to subsequent visual culture surrounding the child hero-martyrs Bara and Viala in imagery that is here briefly reviewed. Even as early as the spring of 1750, connections had been made between children and insurrection during the so-called Children’s Riots, although not in the same way as later. In this instance, the people of Paris directed their violence against the police, accusing them of kidnapping children for possible transport to the colonies. In the ensuing rumor and chaos, there was a blurring of distinctions between bourgeois, working-class, delinquent, and vagrant boys, including ubiquitous street urchins.¹ Just over a decade later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile Or Treatise on Education (1762), which would have such an indelible effect on the French Revolution, set up a tension between nurturing the free expression of the natural boy’s individuality and applying the behavioral engineering of the tutor.² Such questions would be further plumbed in terms of “civilization” and “primitivism” in Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard’s remarkable account of the original enfant sauvage in his The Wild Boy of Aveyron (1801).³ Both before and after Rousseau, French painters including Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson produced emblematic visual meditations on the education of the bourgeois boy, whose often-solitary, absorptive moods ranged from intense concentration to lyrical contemplation.⁴ These quiet boys in interior settings are not rowdy street urchins.

The Great Revolution, like its subsequent iterations in the nineteenth century, would attempt to find an interface between ideals of the educated boy and the street boy as emblem of “the people.” On the one hand, the Convention voted a decree establishing state primary schools, even as children read revolutionary manuals and catechisms to teach them about republican virtues.⁵ On the other hand, boys took oaths and marched in the streets in revolutionary guard battalions and festivals.⁶ This was an activity in which François Rude participated in 1792, as a working-class boy in Dijon, perhaps transmuting the memory of it in the later inclusion of a marching, ephebic gamin in his monumental sculpture La Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (Figure 4.6). It is significant that when boy battalions took their oaths in ceremonies as enfants de la patrie, their fathers (including Rude’s) yielded them to “the fatherland” as part of the revolutionary rhetoric of the family in the social imaginary.⁷

Paternal authority, in fact, increasingly came under pressure because of its inevitable links to the king as father figure, even as the cult of the child emerged in the aura of the father’s diminishing patriarchal role.⁸ The Republic became parent, taking over caring for its abandoned children and declaring the rights of illegitimate ones.⁹ Meanwhile, maternal imagery increasingly dominated the social imaginary in the wake of the Great Revolution, with la patrie blurring into and becoming effaced by la matrie (or la mère patrie) as homeland.¹⁰ Small boys in these images were often nursed, in a manner that would have pleased Rousseau, at the allegorical and fetishized breasts of the polyvalent figure of Marianne/Liberté/La République.¹¹ These enfants de la patrie, united in a sensate bodily experience, thereby acquired connotations of “fraternity,” a component of the social imaginary that increasingly replaced the model of paternalism.¹² This kind of destabilization of the traditional patriarchal family model would continue in the nineteenth century.¹³ The explicit or implicit erotics of the relationship between male children and the maternal figure of Liberty would likewise continue in the visual imaginary, including Delacroix’s painting. The multiracial revolutionary fraternity of black and white boys depicted nursing at the breast of la patrie, with the black boy alluding to the struggle against slavery in French colonies,¹⁴ would have a transformed, and, in many respects, reversed, afterlife in later illustrations for colonialist novels about the gamin de Paris.

Predecessors for the gamin de Paris during the Great Revolution could also be found in scenes of boys marching like soldiers, playing at being republican men,¹⁵ as well as in the margins of visual representations of revolutionary activities of “the people,” or sometimes more centrally in depictions of revolutionary drummer boys in the thick of battle, notably the Napoleonic battle at Arcole.¹⁶ The drum became a frequent attribute of the most famous of the child hero-martyrs of the Great Revolution, Joseph Barra, even though he in all probability never played or carried one.

Like the legend of the boy hero Agricol Viala, the myth of Barra’s supposed martyrdom for the Revolution was fabricated for propagandistic purposes.¹⁷ It was especially convenient that neither boy had a father, thereby emphasizing their roles as enfants de la patrie and enfants du peuple. Held up as virtuous examples to the nation, Bara and Viala were depicted in popular prints being crowned by female figures of Liberty, providing a prototype for the close juxtaposition of Liberty and the gamin de Paris on the right in Delacroix’s later picture.¹⁸ In the most famous revolutionary image of a child, Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the Death of Joseph Bara (Figure I.1), an androgynous innocence is maintained even as the ephebic nude boy, whose genitals are conveniently hidden, is presented as a violated martyr clutching to his breast the revolutionary cocarde (cockade).¹⁹ Bara here became a pubescent symbol of the state of childlike purity to which the Revolution aspired (but could not attain) during the Terror. In this invention of an unlikely Jacobin hero, David’s modification of the adult Academic male body, including the revolutionary symbol of Hercules, displaced child sexuality to an implicit level of the political unconscious.²⁰ As we shall see, the visual example of Bara, if not the David, would be perpetuated in the nineteenth century in works by, among others, David d’Angers and Jean-Joseph Weerts (Plate 16), as well as in school manuals of the early Third Republic.²¹ Collective memory images of revolutionary boys would jostle and inflect those of the later gamins de Paris in the continuing trans formation of such notions as “fraternity,” “nation,” and “people” in the French social imaginary.

Notes

1 Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution, trans. Claudia Miéville (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), especially 88–9. Hugo later mentions these events in his discussion of the phenomenon of the gamin de Paris in Les Misérables.

2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile Or Treatise on Education [1762], trans. William H. Payne (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003).

3 Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, The Wild Boy of Aveyron [1801], trans. George Humphrey and Muriel Humphrey (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1962).

4 Dorothy Johnson, “Education and the Child in the Paintings of Chardin,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1990), 47–68; Katie Scott, “Child’s Play,” in Colin B. Bailey, ed., The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in association with the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2003), 90–105 and cat. nos. 63, 67; Sylvain Bellenger, ed., Girodet 1767–1824 (Paris: Gallimard, Musée du Louvre Éditions, 2006), 375–83 and cat. nos. 77, 78, 79.

5 Albert Soboul, The Sans-Coulottes: The Popular Movement and Revolutionary Government 1793–1794 [1968], trans. Remy Inglis Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 89; Hunt, 67; Noah Shusterman, The French Revolution: Faith, Desire, and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 187.

6 Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution [1976], trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 48, 208; Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 454–55, 503, 522–23, including related illustrations of the topic in gouaches by Le Sueur and Sèvres porcelain.

7 Children were to belong to their mothers until age five and thereafter to the fatherland. On the oaths, see Schama, 522. Rude’s early biographers repeated his childhood recollection: Maximien Legrand, Rude, sa vie, ses oeuvres, son enseignement (Paris: Dentu, 1856), 3–7; Alexis Bertrand, François Rude (Les Artistes célèbres) (Paris: Librairie de l’art, 1888), 10; Louis de Fourcaud, François Rude, Sculpteur: Ses oeuvres et son temps (1784–1855) (Paris: Librairie de l’art ancien et moderne, 1904), 26–7; Joseph Calmette, François Rude (Paris: H. Floury, 1920), 3.

8 Marcel Garaud and Romuald Szramkiewicz, La Révolution française et la famille (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), 174–76; Carol Duncan, “Fallen Fathers: Images of Authority in Pre-Revolutionary French Art,” Art History, IV (June 1981), 186–202; Jean-Claude Bonnet, “De la famille à la patrie,” in Jean Delumeau and Daniel Roche, eds., Histoire des pères et de la paternité (Paris: Larousse, 1990), 235–58; Hunt, ch. 2, especially 27; Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004), 143–46, 296.

9 Soboul, 148; Garaud and Szramkiewicz, 109–30, 177–81; David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 156–57; Desan, ch. 5.

10 Dorothy Johnson traces the shift to la matrie as homeland to the writings on nature and childhood of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, specifically his Études de la nature (1784) and Harmonies de la nature (1815). See her “David d’Angers and the Signs of Landscape,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, series 6, vol. 115 (January-June 1990), 182, note 34. For Revolutionary representations of la patrie as an allegorical female figure, see, among others, Philippe Bordes and Régis Michel, eds., Aux armes & aux arts!: Les arts de la Révolution 1789–1799 (Paris: Éditions Adam Biro, 1988), 144, fig. 126; Schama, 523, fig. 134; Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 155, fig. 4.8; 157, fig. 4.9; 161, fig. 4.11. On la patrie as a maternal concept, see: Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 348; Landes, ch. 4. Both Gutwirth (256) and Landes (132) point out a parallel between the emergence of imagery of the female allegory and the actual exclusion of women from public affairs.

11 The classic study of permutations of allegorical figures of Liberty, ranging from the static and conservative to the active, rebellious, and popular, is Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat: L’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1830 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). For Revolutionary images of breast feeding, including the participation of adult...