Spectacles of virtue: Classicism, waxworks and the festivals of the French Revolution

Abstract

This article traces the impact of popular culture and visual technology on eighteenth‐century neoclassicism. It considers the crucial influence of the waxworks on the work of Jacques‐Louis David. David was connected to the waxworks through his friendship with Philippe Curtius, Marie Tussaud’s uncle and the most renowned impresario of wax entertainments in pre‐revolutionary Paris. With its connection to a newly professionalized medicine, the waxen effigy (the most advanced recording technology of the time) provided David with a model of the integrated body and docile subjectivity at a moment when he was turning away from the face as the key locus of expressivity to a ‘corporal aesthetic’ that emphasized the expressive potential of the body in general. Influenced by a sensationalist epistemology that stressed the formative power of images on the human mind, David believed that these idealized neoclassical simulacra would help to create the ‘new man’ of the Revolution. Displayed in large outdoor festivals, these icons would function as transparent lessons in virtue that would wean the people from their uncivilized archaic traditions and induct them into revolutionary values and proper behavior. Yet, paradoxically, by introducing the instability of representation so feared by eighteenth‐century commentators, his innovations had precisely the opposite effect. Far from demonstrating some sort of mechanistic technological determinism, David’s use of media opened the possibility of resistance to the disciplinary agenda of the festivals and facilitated the reinforcement of longstanding popular values.