Jacques-Louis David's 'Oath of the Tennis Court', 1791, Study notes of Law

Download Jacques-Louis David's 'Oath of the Tennis Court', 1791 and more Study notes Law in PDF only on Docsity! EXTENSION ACTIVITIES – Jacques-Louis David’s ‘Oath of the Tennis Court’, 1791 Read the discussion of Jacques-Louis-David’s ‘Oath of the Tennis Court’ (1791) on p. 3-8 of this handout. Then complete the following extension activities: 1. One of the big problems which faced David as the Revolution progressed was that many of the figures to whom he had given prominence in the 1791 drawing fell from favour as political conditions changed. Using Liberating France (including the Who’s Who) and other sources, find out what happened to Mounier, Mirabeau, Bailly, Barère, Barnave, and Robespierre. Then research the clergymen, Abbé Grégoire and Abbé Sieyès. 2. David alludes to the popular movement which became known as the sans-culottes through the strong and robust figure in the red bonnet of liberty in the lower left hand corner. Referring to Liberating France (including the Section B Timeline), write a paragraph to outline the role played by the sans-culottes movement from 10 August 1792 until the days of Germinal and Prairial Year III, (1 April and 20-23 May 1795). 3. Using Liberating France (including the Who’s Who) and other sources, outline David’s revolutionary career – both as a painter and as a politician. In your answer consider the importance his paintings and drawings 1789-1795, and his role in organising public ceremonies. Then investigate his political activities as a deputy in the National Convention. 4. David uses at least eight revolutionary ideas in his 1791 study of the Tennis Court Oath. Locate them and any other revolutionary ideas not mentioned in the summary above. Where did these ideas come from and how did they develop through the revolutionary period? How far did the revolution stray from some of these foundational principles? To track these ideas it is useful to refer to a number of key documents, including the Constitutions and some of the laws. Set your answer up in a summary table like the one below: Revolutionary principle shown in David’s ‘Oath of the Tennis Court’ Source of the idea – a philosphe or other? Identify the work and give a quote. How is this revolutionary principle laid out in either the Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen or the August Decrees? How is this revolutionary principle implemented in the earlier Constitutions? Consider both the Constitution of 1791 and the Constitution of 1793 as these How far has the revolution strayed from this original revolutionary principle by 1793- 94? Quote from either the ‘Constitution of the Terror’ (Law of 14 Frimaire, i.e. 4 How far does the revolution re-constitute this original revolutionar y principle in the Constitution of Year III, (1795)? Quote the relevant clause. differ on some points, most notably the definition of citizenship. Quote the clause. December 1793) or the other laws, such as the Law of Suspects, 17 September 1793, the Law of 22 Prairial (10 June 1794), the de-Christianisation campaign, and so on. Quote the clause. Revolutionary principle 1 Revolutionary principle 2 See over. Another fraternal embrace expressing uninhibited and open expression of feeling occurs at the left hand edge of the image. The deputies Rewbell and Curé Thibault clasp each other’s shoulders and exchange a direct but warm gaze. They seem delighted to see each other. The openness of this expression of sentiment, the art historian Philippe Bordes has argued, may be directly attributed to the ideas of Rousseau: ‘In becoming free, man approaches nature and simplifies his relations with others’.5 This was Rousseau’s response to the stultifying, rigid and artificial social etiquette of the old regime, and the hypocrisy of manners of which Diderot had complained.6 Upon viewing the drawing of the Tennis Court Oath in 1791, the contemporary art theorist and critic, Quatremère de Qincy, approved of the ‘greater expression of frankness and openness, more natural manners, … more poses which are not wooden or affected, more open emotion and more warmth in the artistic language.’7 Thus David sought to depict the triumph of natural emotion over artifice of the deputies and brotherly relationships which, it was hoped, would mark the new revolutionary society. Other figures in the foreground to which David draws our attention are the as-yet unremarkable deputy from Arras, Maximilien Robespierre, and the Comte Riquetti de Mirabeau, who was one of the most prominent personalities of the Assembly in 1789. Mirabeau was elected a deputy for the Third Estate, not the Second, (which his rank allowed). He was a member of the Society of Thirty, an advocate for the civil rights of Jews and a member of Abbé Grégoire’s Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which was arguing for abolition of slavery or, at the very least, for civil rights for free people of colour in France’s colonies. While the Comte de Mirabeau had a taste for the dramatic gesture, Robespierre was a highly controlled and socially undemonstrative man. To see him represented in such an uninhibited pose, described by Schama as ‘the body language of Rousseauean sincerity and virtue’, stretches our credulity to the extreme.8 The artist explained this pose by claiming it was as if ‘Robespierre had two hearts beating for liberty.’9 In 1789, Robespierre was an obscure deputy from the provinces, not yet of great importance among the Third Estate deputies. David assigns Robespierre prominence in his composition because, by 1791, Robespierre had become the acknowledged leader of the radical element of the Jacobin Club, the faction with which David was increasingly associating himself.10 Behind Mirabeau, David depicts the only peasant representative at the Estates – General, the delegate from Rennes, an old man called ‘Père’ Michel Gérard, with his hands clasped in prayer. ‘Père’ Gérard refused to wear the black and white costume of the Third Estate, instead dressing as he usually did in brown cloth. A peasant proprietor from Brittany, Gérard was a foundation member of the Breton Club, later to become the 5 Philipe Bordes, Le Serment du Jeu de Paume, p.64. 6 Denis Diderot, Essais sur la peinture and Pensées detaches, in Philippe Bordes, p 64. 7 Bordes, Le Serment du Jeu de Paume, p.64. 8 Simon Schama, Citizens, p. 569. 9 J.M. Thompson, The French Revolution, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1964, p. 20. 10 To read more of David’s political career and friendship with Robespierre, see the Who’s Who entry on p. x Jacobins. His rough common sense was admired as the voice of popular wisdom, and his countryman's waistcoat and plaited hair were later to become the model for the Jacobin fashion.11 Opposition and Exclusions It is at the edges of the image that David portrays those who are either excluded from the action or in opposition to it. At the right-hand edge of the image is the deputy Martin d’Auch, famously the only deputy who opposed the Oath, arguing that he could not ‘conscientiously support measures not sanctioned by the King’.12 We see him seated with arms crossed in a refusal to stand and take the oath. Camus, the deputy in front of d’Auch urges him to his feet, while Tronchet behind restrains his excited colleague. The right to freedom of opinion, one of the great underpinning values of the new ideas, is thus expressed in a revolutionary cameo within a great revolutionary image. In the right hand public gallery above d’Auch, excluded from the action in June 1789 but passionately involved as observers, are elements Schama has identified as ‘The People’ i– women, children and curious members of the Royal Guard.ii Bordes has claimed that their metaphorical role was to ‘transmit the spirit of the oath to the whole nation’,iii while Schama has described them as ‘audience, pupils and ideal citizens: patriotic …but never threatening in their unruliness.’iv Whatever role David conceived for this group in his drawing, Michael Adcock has realistically reminded us that the largely middle class and exclusively male deputies on the floor of the tennis court, euphorically swept up in this fraternal moment, seem unaware of these marginalised groups ‘merely looking in and observing a ritual theoretically conducted on their behalf’. Adcock warns that ‘By 1793, this marginalisation would become unacceptable, and these groups would challenge the very idea of representative democracy.’v Finally, we know from David’s own sketchbooks that the man writing on paper against the wall is one ‘Mr Maret, (sic) newspaper editor, taking notes’.vi Acting as a counterbalance in the lower left-hand gallery we see more of the People: the deputy Maupetit de la Mayenne, who had been too ill to attend on that day, is carried in by two men, one a robust worker, with bare legs and feet, but wearing the Phrygian bonnet of liberty of the freed slave of ancient Rome. By 1792 this bonnet rouge had become the pervasive symbol of the sans-culottes, worn by all in the popular movement who wished publicly to demonstrate their revolutionary fervour. Schama has written that David represented the People of 20 June 1789 as ‘audience, pupils and 11 Thompson, p.20. 12 Thompson, p.20. ideal citizens: patriotic … but never threatening in their unruliness.’13 This ideal changed quickly, with the popular movement of Paris acting decisively in defence of the National Assembly on 14 July 1789 and again on 5-6 October, when the women of Paris marched to Versailles to force the King to approve its laws . By August 1792, the sans-culottes could be mobilised at short notice to take armed action in the streets of Paris, as the Revolutionary Commune called upon them to do on the journée of 10 August, the day King Louis XVI fell from the throne. This was popular sovereignty in action. When, in November and December of 1792, the new republican National Convention debated the legality of putting the King on trial, Robespierre claimed, ‘Louis cannot be judged; he is already judged. …To propose a trial for Louis XVI … is to put the Revolution itself on trial.’14 Robespierre held a deeply rooted Rousseauean belief that the people ‘are always guided by purity of intention’ (a pamphlet of December 1792) and ‘there is nothing so just or so good as the people, whenever they are not stirred- up by the excesses of oppression’ (April 1791).15 As the people had exercised the general will through action on the journée of August 10, in Robespierre’s mind, to call their sovereignty into question was to challenge the right of the National Convention itself to exist. David’s use of nature to heighten dramatic impact Finally, David reminds the viewer of the elemental nature of the momentous shift in power and perception which took place on 20 June 1789. In the left-hand upper gallery he depicts one of the summer thunderstorms which broke over Versailles during that month. On 20 June 1789 more heavy rain fell, as the deputies of the newly named National Assembly, barred from their meeting hall by royal guards, adjourned to the nearby Royal Tennis Court where they took their famous oath not to disband until they had written a constitution for France. The significance of this day was clear to all. Arthur Young, the English commentator, recorded in his journal on 21 June, ‘The step that the Commons have taken is, in fact, an assumption of all authority in the Kingdom.’16 This overturning of old-regime conventions and traditional sovereignty is suggested by David through the turbulence of the drapery and the inside out umbrella. For those who believed in omens, the thunderstorm was the physical harbinger (forewarning) of the end of the old regime. Although it is difficult to see, David shows the lightning bolt that struck the Chappelle Royale at Versailles, which Phillipe Bordes has interpreted this bolt of lightning as ‘a common evocation of the violence of the Revolution, as well as a typical Enlightenment condemnation of the political-religious system on which absolute monarchy was founded.’17 13 Schama, Citizens, p. 569. 14 Robespierre, ‘On the action to be taken against Louis XVI,’ Address to the National Convention, 3 December 1792, in George Rudé (ed), Robespierrre, Great Lives Observed, Prentice-Hall Inc., New Jersey, 1967, p.27. 15 Barrie Rose, Tribunes and Amazons, Ch. 12, ‘Robespierre and the Popular Movement,’ Macleay, Sydney, 1998, p. 211. 16 Thompson, The French Revolution, p. 20. 17 Phillipe Bordes, ‘Jacques-Louis David’s “Serment du Jeu de Paume”: Propaganda without a cause?’, Oxford Art Journal, February, 1980, p.23.