Tea at Trianon: Dark Neoclassicism: The Unrealized Architectural Aesthetic of the French Revolution

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 13, 2024

Dark Neoclassicism: The Unrealized Architectural Aesthetic of the French Revolution

From Architizer:

Whatever one’s politics, it is hard to not be impressed by the sheer audacity of the Jacobins, who during the years of the First Republic attempted to change things as fundamental as the calendar. For a few brief years, 1792 was known as “Year One.” Even God was renamed. Henceforth, He was to be called the “Supreme Being.”

In art and architecture, as opposed to politics, the French Revolution’s legacy is more ambiguous. Although Robespierre’s rhetoric, with its calls for a radical renewal of the nation along secular and democratic lines, seemed to anticipate 20th century modernists like Le Corbusier, the most radical years of the revolution — 1792 to 1794 — saw very little construction in Paris, much less an upheaval of the city’s visual language. If there is one visual aesthetic that is closely linked to the French Revolution, it is Neoclassicism, which was also popular in the years before and after the revolution.

Jacques-Louis David is the painter associated most closely with the Revolutionary years due to his elegiac painting “The Death of Marat,” which has forever linked a serene and saintlike image with the man who encouraged the sans-culottes to “devour the palpitating hearts” of the bourgeoisie. But David was not really a radical in aesthetics; he was equally at home, a few years later, painting portraits of Napoleon. (Read more.)