The Objects of History: A Reply to Philip StewartEngraven Desire: Eros, Image, and text in the French Eighteenth Century. Philip Stewart

Abstract

nouns in Latin. In many ways, this is the standard argument and seems commonsensical. What it ignores, however, are the fascinating changes that could be introduced in a period of crisis, such as the French Revolution. I argued in an earlier work that the revolutionaries were not altogether content with the dominance of Libert6 as a republican symbol. As the Revolution moved in a more radical direction during the Terror, the artist and Jacobin deputy Jacques-Louis David made Hercules, refigured as icon of Le Peuple, a centerpiece of his propaganda efforts.5 This entailed no direct challenge to the iconographical tradition, however-only a shift in emphasis. Later efforts proved even more thoroughgoing, I have discovered. The vignettes of the Manuel des autorites constituees de la Republique franCaise of 1797 are an especially telling case in point. In this work, designed for a wide official audience, the artist seemed intent on defeminizing as much as possible the standard repertory of republican allegory. Alongside the Liberties and Truths that maintained their traditional feminine form and the French People as the masculine Hercules, installed Love of the Fatherland, Our Ancestors, Courage, Disinterestedness, Virility, Happiness, Old Age, and Hatred of Tyrants and Traitors, all of them represented by masculine figures (including the feminine nouns la virilite, la vieillesse, and la haine). Among thirty-six engravings, no less than nineteen were masculine allegories, sixteen were feminine, and Humankind alone showed a couple.6 The balance had been tipped away from the feminine allegory, supposedly fixed in traditional allegorical usage. It appears then that the republican authorities were encouraging a deliberate recasting of the iconographic repertory; they consciously sought masculine replacements for some of the traditional feminine allegories. They did this either by choosing to emphasize previously underutilized masculine nouns such as stoicism and disinterestedness or by representing feminine nouns with masculine allegories, as in the case of la Post&rite, represented by a male figure. Thus the nearly perfect correlation between the gendering of nouns and allegorical figurations of the Old Regime and early Revolution could come at least partially undone. It may be true that Libert6 could not be represented as anything but a woman, but this may be for at least partly historical and political reasons (it was used so much and thus was hard to refigure) and not entirely for linguistic reasons. La Haine, la Posterite, and la Virilit6 could in fact change sex, in terms of their allegorical representation. Thus, even staid and stolid iconography, when pressed, is very much related to social facts. History has a way of undoing all efforts to stabilize or fix usage. Meanings cannot be divorced from social and political processes. It is our task-in both history and art history, in this case-to unravel 5 Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), pp. 87-119. 6 Manuel des autorite's constitue'es de la Re'publique fran,aise (Paris, 1797). The engravings illustrated each decadi of the calendar. The frontispiece reads, drawn by Queverdo, engraved by Blanchard, but the engravings in the text read only Queverdo fecit. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.116 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 06:09:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms