Precarious Partners

Horses and Their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France

Kari Weil

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780226686400
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

From the recent spate of equine deaths on racetracks to protests demanding the removal of mounted Confederate soldier statues to the success and appeal of War Horse, there is no question that horses still play a role in our lives—though fewer and fewer of us actually interact with them. In Precarious Partners, Kari Weil takes readers back to a time in France when horses were an inescapable part of daily life. This was a time when horse ownership became an attainable dream not just for soldiers but also for middle-class children; when natural historians argued about animal intelligence; when the prevalence of horse beatings led to the first animal protection laws; and when the combined magnificence and abuse of these animals inspired artists, writers, and riders alike.Weil traces the evolving partnerships established between French citizens and their horses through this era. She considers the newly designed "races" of workhorses who carried men from the battlefield to the hippodrome, lugged heavy loads through the boulevards, or paraded women riders, amazones, in the parks or circus halls—as well as those unfortunate horses who found their fate on a dinner plate. Moving between literature, painting, natural philosophy, popular cartoons, sports manuals, and tracts of public hygiene, Precarious Partners traces the changing social, political, and emotional relations with these charismatic creatures who straddled conceptions of pet and livestock in nineteenth-century France.

CHAPTER ONE

Heads or Tails? Painting History with a Horse

The horse may be the only nonhuman animal deemed worthy of visual representation throughout history. Equines were the most numerous of the animals depicted on the walls of the Lascaux Cave in France during the Paleolithic era. Throughout Greek history horses were painted and carved with or without chariots to emphasize their importance in battle and for travel. The tradition of equestrian portraiture depicting emperors and noblemen on horseback began in antiquity and flourished in Europe during the Renaissance and early modern period. In visual records of heroic action or royal governance, horses appear both as literal support and as symbolic embodiment of the defiant forces of nature that a figure of authority, usually male, has harnessed. This is why Buffon described the horse as the “most beautiful conquest of man,” beauty and utility being inseparable in eighteenth-century aesthetics.1 Significant events in human history depended on horses, a fact many written histories, unlike visual accounts, ignored. But what about the horse as a subject in his (or her) own right? Might the horse also be a subject of history so that, as Daniel Roche suggests, we might reverse Buffon’s adage and say, “Man is the horse’s finest conquest”?2

“Does history need animals?” This question was posed by a special issue of the journal History and Theory, and the answer depends both on what we mean by history and on what we mean by animals.3 If we accept that we humans are animals, certainly there would be no history without us. The notion of an animal history, however, takes us beyond regarding animals as worthy historical objects of our world so we can see how such objects must also be regarded as historical subjects and thus as themselves agents of history—ours and theirs. Horses are our partners on the battlefield as in the streets, but it is a precarious partnership that can be threatened on both sides, whether by resistance, by miscommunication, or by a breach of trust. This notion of animal partnership and hence agency becomes especially visible in horse paintings of the nineteenth century, which also constitute a significant challenge to any lingering acceptance of the Cartesian idea of the animal machine, subject only to “management” by its owner.4

In many regards the eighteenth century was transitional for horsemanship and for visual representations of horses and riders. Donna Landry argues that the increasingly popular importing of “Eastern” horses into Europe and especially into England at this time changed methods of training and handling because of their different physical and mental capacities.5 The particular intelligence of Arabian horses influenced British horsemanship, Landry writes, and made them into lauded subjects of equine portraiture, if not also critical viewers of those portraits. Legend has it that the famous racehorse Whistlejacket reared in reaction to the portrait George Stubbs painted of him in 1762.6 Art historian Walter Leidtke writes that the eighteenth century marked the culmination of the tradition of royal equestrian portraiture, but it was also a period of “unintended parody,” as in Goya’s “dismounted equestrian portraits.”7 With the rise of aristocratic and bourgeois riders, equestrian portraiture was no longer reserved for royalty; in the works of George Stubbs (1724–1806), it could indicate nostalgia for the pleasures of nature and the countryside.8 The growth of natural history during the century also contributed to notions of animal agency, even as its organization and taxonomy emphasized an animal’s subservience to human history and human use. Buffon, for example, appeared to recognize a certain agency on the horse’s part insofar as the horse accepted not only his domestication but also his participation in a history made by his master.9 “The horse shares the fatigue of war and the glory of combat; as intrepid as his master, the horse sees peril and confronts it.”10

Artistic representations of horses, and of nonhuman animals more generally, informed the new field of natural history by confirming human dominance over nature and regarding domestication as divinely ordained. In taxonomies such as Buffon’s Natural History (published in thirty-six volumes from 1749 to 1789) or Thomas Bewick’s General History of Quadrupeds (1790), horses were placed at the top of the animal kingdom, closest to man through their service to him or their ability to reflect his power and nobility, though assuredly distanced from him as part of the natural world. This closeness was also regarded as moral insofar as obedience and will become the same thing. Thus Buffon ascribes agency to the horse who denies his own will and represses his desires in order to obey his human master. “It is a creature who renounces his being in order to exist only by the volition of another,” he writes, adding, moreover, that the horse “will even exhaust himself and die in order to obey.”11

That horses could will their own death out of obedience is visually confirmed by the illustrations in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (fig. 1.1), where the horse’s prostrate and fully exposed position (shared by many of the mammals represented) suggests that he died not only for his master but also for his master’s science and need to know. It is in this regard that eighteenth-century representations of the horse confirm a particular Enlightenment ideology regarding the natural order and man’s place within it. The conventions of natural history and art history in England, as in France, were mutually influential in depicting the animal order and man’s place above it. The long tradition of history and equestrian painting lends support to Buffon’s pronouncement that the horse is a conquest of man, evidence and symbol of his (and I use the masculine deliberately) power over nature, as over history. But the work of Théodore Géricault paints a different picture of the horse and of history—one that defies human separation from nature as it confuses hierarchies of human and horse as conqueror and conquered.

Figure 1.1. Abdomen of a horse, published in Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, avec la description du cabinet du roi, published in several volumes, 1749–1804. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library at the University of London.

At the end of his book Walter Leidtke looks ahead to the works of Géricault and Rosa Bonheur and to a shift whereby the horse’s rearing is attributed to “the power and, one might add, the nobility of the animal, and not of his master.”12 This shift in the locus of agency from human to horse is echoed by Karen Raber and Treva Tucker, who describe a new “Romantic version of the horse in art,” often riderless or “free,” as in Géricault’s Rome paintings. They argue that this changed role of the horse in visual representation echoes a shift in contemporary manuals of horsemanship, such that in the early modern period “we move from an irrational horse that must be restrained and contained by the rational (and, if necessary, forceful) control of its rider, to a rational horse that must be persuaded by its rational rider to form a cooperative, yet still highly disciplined partnership.”13 Intelligence, will, and agency are also vital to Géricault’s horses, who are indeed partners of their riders. But that partnership loses its rational balance and, as a result, newly illustrates the animal or bodily passions shared by horse and human as each negotiates the entangled worlds of nature and culture.

Géricault’s equestrian paintings are emblematic of shifting and conflicting attitudes toward the natural world in France in the early nineteenth century and toward the place and nature of human-animal relations within it. Visible in his work is the shift from the homosocial horse world of the Ancien régime, where riding offered privilege and prestige to aristocratic and military men, to the bourgeois horse culture of the more modern world that would increasingly be dominated by women riders and by the sports of racing and hunting. Equestrian portraits of bourgeois men and amazones would grow more and more popular, and whereas Buffon, like his contemporaries, would celebrate the horse for sharing in the “fatigue of war,” by the middle of the nineteenth century the painter Gustave Courbet would depict horse and rider sharing the fatigue of the hunt (fig. 1.2). Beauty and nobility are not part of the image. Caught within this shift, however, Géricault’s particular way of painting the horse, and especially of painting horses and humans together, defies easy identification of personage, activity, or class, because his horses are neither mere accessories to historic (and virile) conquest nor aestheticized possessions. Until the final stages of his shortened career, Géricault paints the horse as a subject and other who can be neither conquered nor fully controlled. His paintings of horses and of history, I argue, contest the certainties established in Enlightenment and historical picturing and thus contest the status of the knowing human subject. Turning the animal gaze upon the paintings’ viewers, Géricault’s horses reveal the limits of man’s knowledge and dominance in the world.

Figure 1.2. Gustave Courbet, Hunter on Horseback, ca. 1864. Image courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

If I call Géricault’s horse an other, I do so not in the sense of Simone de Beauvoir’s descriptions of woman as man’s other, defined through and against the priority of the masculine/human. To be sure, critics such as Linda Nochlin have suggested that horses might stand in for women in his paintings,14 but I suggest that his horse is what could be called a queer other who challenges both anthropocentric and gender norms. This sense of queer draws on understandings of “queer ecology” (or ecologies) that merge ecological criticism and queer studies in order to contest accepted notions of a “natural order” that excludes nonnormative sexual relations on the grounds that they are somehow against nature. Queer ecology is a necessary corrective to accepted notions of the “natural” in both environmental and sexuality studies that would frame nonnormative sexual activity (within or between species) as outside or against nature.15 Indeed, any such separation of human and natural worlds that valorizes nature as “normative” goes against the very meaning of ecology, which, Timothy Morton writes, “demands intimacies with other beings that queer theory also demands.” Such intimacies, Morton argues, prove the antiessentialism of evolution itself, insofar as it is a process that “abolishes rigid boundaries between and within species.”16 Géricault was deeply intimate with horses. He painted them attentively throughout his career and kept a horse-head sculpture in his studio. He also rode with what has been called a “suicidal passion” and died from a fall off his horse. What or who were his horses to him?17

ANIMAL PICTURING: FROM ENLIGHTENMENT IDEALS TO ROMANTIC ALIVENESS

Géricault began painting before the theory of evolution promoted a view of the animal order as “nature red in tooth and claw,” nature whose brute savagery needed to be separated from humans and tamed before entering their households. His view of natural fertility and reproduction also precedes the scientific understanding of sexual selection (pitting male against male for access to the female) and follows from Enlightenment conventions that pictured animals as either objects of anatomical knowledge or extensions of the human world. Animal picturing was integral to natural history, and as Alex Potts argues, its prominence coincided with an “idea of picturing [that] functioned in Enlightenment science as an important general model for the systematic observation and representation of natural phenomena. The aesthetic dimension was seen as integral to its scientific function as a clear and coherent display of knowledge.”18 To picture was to know; Potts’s use of “picturing” has echoes of what Martin Heidegger has called the “world picture” or “the world conceived and grasped as picture.”19 In his essay “The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger links the growth of modern Western science to a new objectification of the world by and before a viewer who frames what is to be seen, a viewer who is made subject through this view. As the picture renders the world kno...