Material Culture of the French Revolution

I am just back from a two-week research trip to Paris during which I worked in the Archives Nationales, and a trip to the Musee Carnavalet (focused on the history of Paris) got me thinking about material culture. As a result of my research, I’ve become fascinated by Robespierre, and I got to handle a lot of documents that he put his name to. Known as “the Incorruptible,” he was the leader of the Jacobins and is usually singled out as the architect of the Terror. He was a slight man with a weak, high voice, but he came to dominate the Revolution during its most heated phase. Before the Revolution, he was so opposed to capital punishment that he resigned a judicial post because he could not pass the sentence of death against offenders. But during the Terror, he orchestrated the deaths of thousands of innocent people. He was almost puritanical in his personal life, but he was also a dandy with a penchant for dressing well and wearing a powdered wig (which was decidedly old-fashioned by the 1790s).

To my surprise, finding much of anything about Robespierre or the French Revolution in Paris is difficult. There is no museum of the Revolution. The closest you can come to a museum of the Revolution is a set of galleries at the top floor of the Musee Carnavalet. Here’s how one Web site describes the museum:

This museum dedicated to Paris memory is formed of two famous XVIth and XVIIth mansions offering a circuit of more than 140 rooms displaying archeological remains from prehistory to modern times. The rooms from 1789-95 are full of sacred mementos such as models of the Bastille, original Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, tricolore and liberty caps, sculpted allegories of Reason, crockery with revolutionary slogans, and execution orders to make you shed a tear for the royalists as well.

The royalist bias is evident in the quotation and in the museum: you are not invited to shed a tear for Robespierre. Indeed, to get up to the Revolution galleries this summer you had to follow a circuitous detour through the museum (due to repair work on one stair well this summer) and walk up three big flights of stairs, entering the galleries at the end, and working your way from Napoleon back to the calling of the Estates General in 1789. But one benefit of this reverse entry is that the first thing you encounter is a large painting of Robespierre laid out on a table, his jaw broken by a gun shot. This is how he spent his last night before being guillotined in the Thermidorean Revolution of 27 July 1794. It is a triumphalist painting, meant to show Robespierre getting his just deserts. But coming out of context (that is, before you see the galleries and their pro-royalist narrative), it is unsettling and pathetic.

The Revolution galleries contain a lot of fascinating material, but it’s hidden up and away, and few people had ventured up there the day I visited. There are the predictable red liberty caps, pikes, and medals struck in honor of the storming of the Bastille. But I especially enjoyed the display of crockery with revolutionary slogans because these were homemade objects, plates and cups with the words and images of the Revolution on them. Their hominess contradicted the implied thesis of the exhibition that the Revolution was an embarrassing event, manipulated by a handful of maniacs like Robespierre. Also out of place were the objects that related to Robespierre himself. They had a pretty drinking cup that he used, his wash basin, and a memento of him, containing a lock of his hair. There were oddly intimate objects, and the latter two particularly so because they recalled his fastidious nature. Seeing them and then walking out past the large painting of him on the eve of his execution, bloodied and unable to speak, made them all the more affecting.

And so I’m left wondering why the Robespierre-related objects were there in the first place. Why those objects? The wash basin and fancy cup recalled his fastidiousness, and that had both personal and political connotations. He was an idealist, and the Terror was partly a result of his desire for a pure Republic, one cleansed of the very existence of royalists. The momento of his hair recalled his wig and the politics of hair in the Revolution. Although Robespierre is now equated with the lawless, radical sans coulottes, he disapproved of their excesses. They were roaring, macho terrorists who grew long hair and gigantic moustaches in order to make their appearance fierce. Robespierre’s powdered wig and punctiliousness stood in sharp contrast. Unfortunately, these objects were labeled very simply, not contextualized in terms of his life or manners, and so unless you knew a bit about him going in, you wouldn’t get much out of the visit.