Virtue and Fortune: French Republicanism and Eugene Delacroix's Library Murals in the Palais Bourbon and Palais du Luxembourg

Until now critics of Delacroix's legislative library murals have situated them in a forward-looking trajectory of either revolutionary democracy or avant-garde modernism. Deeming his programs as a reactionary escape from, or indifference to politics, these critical traditions have prevented a close historical investigation of the specific relationship between Delacroix's murals and French liberalism during the July Monarchy.

As the dominant political group of the legislative chambers, the liberals implemented in the library system a social theory developed in their Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques whereby wealth and virtue could be made compatible. This encouraged the liberals' commissioning Delacroix to decorate the ceilings of their libraries with programs of civic virtue. Drawing on the methodology of J. G. A. Pocock and the Cambridge School of political theory, I analyze how the liberals' commercial policies destabilized their moorings from collective republican principles.

Examination of Delacroix's thematic tension in the murals between virtue and fortuna, or civic morality and economic flux, reveals the liberal's failure to reconcile the reality of their private wealth and their patriotic ideal of public service. Delacroix's murals show his ethico-political attempt to rejuvenate the corrupt patterns of economic liberalism; they do not manifest his fear of radical democracy. His use of advice treatises on statecraft, reinforced by the republican ethos of his earlier oeuvre, especially the Massacres of Chios, served to warn the wealthy legislators regarding the depoliticization of virtue and the break-down of shared communication so essential for patriotism.

I investigate Delacroix's position as an institutional "insider" who criticized social liberalism by situating his civic murals within a German Idealist tradition of aesthetic education that did not conceive culture as political retreat, or bourgeois indifference. Mediated through Victor Cousin, Delacroix used Friedrich Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man to develop his moralizing strategy of symbolic fragmentation in the murals whereby bourgeois subjectivity could be ennobled spiritually toward civic-collectivist values. Together with Paul Chenavard and Gustave Courbet, Delacroix's murals participate in a major theme of art's educative role in improving French statecraft between 1840 and 1855.