The people in the aftermath of anger
Type de matériel :
98
When history painter Delaroche depicted Les Vainqueurs de la Bastille between 1830 and 1838, he had not taken any interest as yet in the French Revolution of 1789. He tackled the topic – the insurrection of part of the Parisian people against the royal prison, a symbol of feudal oppression – in the context of a commission of four works for the town hall of Paris, meant to honour the historical role of the people. In 1830, when another revolution happened, that of the Trois Glorieuses, the event was still so acute in the collective memory and the historians were just about beginning to tackle it as a major historical fact in the history of France. Paul Delaroche’s view on the fall of the Ancien Régime, as a nineteenth-century and romantic artist, is thus interesting for its political resonance, its artistic position – representing the people once the anger has subsided – and for his role in the shaping of a collective imaginary of the Revolution in the nineteenth century.
Réseaux sociaux