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An anonymous caricature mocking the royal family’s failed attempt to flee Paris. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet |
History buffs, especially those fascinated by the French Revolution, will appreciate the exhibition “The French Revolution: Hidden Treasures of the Musée Carnavalet,” which …
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An anonymous caricature mocking the royal family’s failed attempt to flee Paris. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet |
History buffs, especially those fascinated by the French Revolution, will appreciate the exhibition “The French Revolution: Hidden Treasures of the Musée Carnavalet,” which also serves as a concise and entertaining visual history for those less well-versed in the story of the tumultuous time between the taking of the Bastille and the establishment of the Directoire only six years later.
Since Carnavalet is Paris’s official history museum, it is not surprising that it owns the world’s largest collection of documents on the Revolution, with some 25,000 pieces. Even though a large part of the museum is given over to the showing of these artworks and artifacts, only a small portion can be displayed at any time. This intelligently selected temporary exhibition offers an opportunity to show works that are too fragile to be on permanent display, as well as some recent acquisitions.
Displayed chronologically, the show consists mostly of engravings and illustrations of events of the day, many of them providing an almost photographic record of the many dramatic moments of the Revolution. Like photographs, they may not always offer a perfectly accurate account, but they do capture the excitement of such events as the taking of the Bastille; the women’s march to Versailles; the arrival of the royal family in Paris accompanied by a mob; troops camping on the Champs de Mars (future home of the Eiffel Tower); the arrest of the royal family in Varennes after their failed attempt to escape France in 1791; a mob taunting Berthier de Sauvigny with the head of his father-in-law, Foulon, on a post, while he is being led to his own execution; the massacre of prisoners in the Abbaye de Saint Germain des Prés; Louis XVI’s executioner holding his head up to the crowd; Robespierre under siege in Paris’s Hôtel de Ville; the Revolutionary fêtes on the Champs de Mars; and much more.
The exhibition also includes portraits of many of those who played leading roles in the various phases of the Revolution – Jean-Sylvain Bailly, Camille Desmoulins, the Marquis de La Fayette, the Marquis de Condorcet, Charlotte Corday (Marat’s assassin), etc. – and a number of caricatures, which were used as a way to inflame public opinion. One, bearing the caption, “They want only the best for us,” shows poor peasants being blessed by a fat priest in rich robes while other poor people pay taxes to an evil-looking clerk. Another shows emaciated peasants carrying the well-fed rich on their backs.
We also see how politics filtered down to everyday life in the form of revolutionary scenes on objects like watches, ceramics and even the Toile de Jouy once favored by the aristocracy. A special display case is devoted to the imprisonment of the royal family in the Temple and includes a portrait of the little Dauphin, who died there at the age of ten, along with a tiny pair of his trousers and a jacket. One of Marie-Antoinette’s slippers is also on show.
Other notable exhibits include a handsome set of illustrations by Salvatore Tresca, after Lafitte, of the new revolutionary calendar with names of the months invented by poet Fabre d’Eglantine; each month is represented by a beautiful young woman. There are also portraits of post-Revolutionary citizens in all their hairy glory – mustaches and other facial hair were favored as a reaction to the prissily shaved and powdered representatives of the Ancien Régime.
The exhibition fizzles out when it gets to the Directoire, the period when the Revolution itself was fizzling out and preparing the way for a new future monarch, Napoleon, depicted as a superhero in one of the portraits here. You can continue your visit upstairs, where a small exhibition of English caricatures made at the time of the Revolution and the Empire shows how the events in France were depicted by the country’s longstanding enemy across the Channel (not very politely but very scatologically) and in room after room in the Carnavalet’s top-floor section on the Revolution.
Musée Carnavalet: 23, rue Sévigné, 75003 Paris. Métro: Saint Paul. Tel.: 01 44 59 58 58. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Closed Monday and public holidays. Admission: €7. Through January 3, 2010. www.carnavalet.paris.fr
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