Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750–1870 by Suzanne Glover Lindsay (review)

Abstract

Lindsay, Suzanne Glover. Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750-1870. Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 254. ISBN: 978-1-4094-2261-7 What do monuments for the dead reveal about the living? And to what extent are these structures, which attempt to immortalize fallen heroes and departed loved ones, inextricably linked to the social and political climate of a specific time and place? These questions are at the heart of Suzanne Glover Lindsay's Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult. Lindsay argues that modern effigy tomb sculpture asserts that the individual existed (because he died), with an identifiable place in historical time; her study explores how this monarchical--and, the eighteenth century, out-dated and under-represented--form of funerary art was revitalized and transformed to embrace modern views of death and commemoration in nineteenth-century France (128). In demonstrating how the social, religious and civic concerns that shaped the metropolis were frequently replicated within the policies governing the necropolis, this study situates effigies within a broader context in order to explore how a modern, urban people went about, as the subtitle cleverly states, living with the dead in France. In spite of a somewhat narrow focus on a particular type of sculpture--the recumbent effigy (gisant) that reproduces the corpse of the deceased--Lindsay's text nevertheless embraces an interdisciplinary approach, with a particular emphasis on how funerary sculpture regularly intersected with issues of architecture (notably the buildings that housed funerary monuments) and landscape (in the form of outdoor, garden-like cemeteries). Looking at burial and commemorative practices during a time of social and political upheaval, Lindsay argues that changes in funerary practices that began in the eighteenth century--caused the public health crisis resulting from a too-close contact with the dead and the disruption of the Revolution--forced an obstinate populace to advocate for the continued proximity of their deceased friends and family members. While the nineteenth-century city is often discussed as a site of increasing distance and alienation, the cemetery remained a space that drew diverse communities of mourners together, so that by way of this physical and psychological intimacy, the effigy tomb fulfills the promise of union and reunion across the mortal threshold given at the funeral (202). Beginning and ending the book with detailed readings of Godefroy Cavaignac's tomb in the Montmartre cemetery, executed sculptors Francois Rude and Ernest Christophe, Lindsay documents a dramatic shift in funerary sculpture. …