Politics by Another Name: Government-Sponsored Art in Paris, 1870-1900

The relation between art and politics in late 19th-century France and its implications for modernism is an established pursuit of art historians. This study examines a range of government-sponsored art and architecture in Paris from 1870 to 1900 in order to broaden our understanding of the dynamics of power in a nascent polity and the role of images in articulating political debates. The decorative program designed by the Marquis Philippe de Chennevieres for the Pantheon (1874), Jules Dalou's bronze sculpture Le Triomphe de la Republique (1879-99) in the Place de la Nation, Paul Baudry's painting La Glorification de la loi (1880) for the Cour de Cassation in the Palais de Justice and the Grand Palais and Petit Palais built for the Exposition universelle of 1900 appeared as re-interpretations of tradition in response to the antagonism that marked the genesis of the Third Republic. A chronological treatment allows for the presentation of these monuments in their social and political environments, an exercise that starts from Pierre Bourdieu's theory that struggle itself, not its resolution, is the creative principle of a cultural system. The impact on the selected objects of the failed attempt to restore the monarchy in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, the Boulanger Affair that ended in 1889 and the chaos of last decade of the century is analyzed. The complex of factors from which these works emerged identifies the mechanisms by which meaning accrued to official art. Allegory, appropriation, narrative, intertextuality and public ritual, used alone or in combination, are shown to have been reliable strategies for producing effective visual arguments. By studying these works independent of a modernist agenda, which emphasizes an artist's originality and the resolution of aesthetic problems, the function of art as a mise-en-scene of democratic discourse is made relevant.