Review: The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France by Richard Taws

Abstract

Richard Taws The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013, 288 pp., 24 color and 66 b/w illus. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271054186; $35.95 (paper), ISBN 9780271054193 “There are monuments other than those of stone and marble, and they will always be remembered, even though they lasted no longer than a decade.”1 The temporary but indelible monuments of the French Revolution described by nineteenth-century art historian Jules Renouvier are at the center of Richard Taws’s fascinating new book, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France , which explores how an unlikely range of “transitional, provisional, ephemeral, and half-made images and objects” (2) became pivotal to the visual and material culture of the French Revolution. While the book is primarily directed toward readers familiar with the key events of this brief-but-complicated moment in French history, Taws’s novel approach to “the provisional” as both a field of representation and form of materiality that embodied the politics and poetics of revolution will resonate with a broader audience interested in issues of time and materiality. More specifically, this text will appeal to architectural historians seeking to understand how temporary monuments can become potent bearers of meaning at critical junctures of political, social, and cultural change. This beautifully illustrated book is divided into six chapters examining a range of objects and images produced within the charged revolutionary period from 1789 to 1799. In lieu of a monographic format driven by a single protagonist, Taws’s thematic chapters follow the multiple trajectories and material traces of things formerly dismissed by art historians as marginalia of little artistic merit: Republican calendars and almanacs, paper currency and caricature, Bastille rubble refashioned into miniatures of the prison, melted-down shackles made into rings, as well as participatory outdoor festivals. Produced within the swiftly changing and often conflicting political instants of the revolutionary period, such objects, images, and events shared qualities of impermanence. The book sheds new light on a decade that has been …