Category Archives: Revolution

All the glories of France: the many-layered symbolism of Versailles

04 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in 1848, Commemoration, France, History, Memory, Paris, Revolution

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Yesterday (3 July 2017) the French president Emmanuel Macron addressed the Assemblée Nationale and the Sénat en Congrès, in the Salle du Congrès at the palace of Versailles. Macron’s speech to the combined houses of the French parliament was an unusual move, though not without precedent – François Hollande addressed both houses at Versailles in the wake of the terrorist attacks on Paris in November 2015, and Nicolas Sarkozy convened Congrès in June 2009 to respond to both the ongoing economic crisis and to criticism of his government’s legislative programme. However, both of these speeches were exceptional, in contrast to Macron’s stated intention to address the two houses annually.

Macron a Versailles

Macron walks through the Galerie des Bustes at Versailles before addressing the Assemblée nationale and Sénat in Congrès. He’s loving this. (Image via Guardian/Reuters)

Macron au Congres

With a painting of the opening of the Estates-General in 1789 above him, Emmanuel Macron speaks to the Assemblée nationale and Sénat in the Salle du Congrès, Versailles, 3 July 2017 (Image: Guardian/Reuters)

Unsurprisingly, given the overt ancien régime connotations of the Château de Versailles, many critics denounced Macron as a would-be monarch. Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who led the 17 MPs from his La France insoumise party in a boycott of the Congrès, couldn’t make up his mind whether Macron was Louis XVI or Napoleon:

For others, Macron’s choice of location evoked memories of the monarchist Assembly elected in 1871, which sat at Versailles (rather than Paris, seat of government since 1789 with the exception of the National Assembly’s brief stint in Bordeaux during the Franco-Prussian War). The French historian Mathilde Larrère, while recognising the use of the Salle du Congrès as part of republican government since 1871, hinted at ‘monarchist and anti-Communard’ undertones in the choice of location:

I’m not going to try to analyse Macron’s use of Versailles yesterday, to work out whether he’s a Bourbon or a Bonaparte in the making, or to reflect on the content of his speech or  the significance of his promise to convene Congrès every year for a ‘State of the Union’-style address. (It is worth noting, though, that a similar speech was set down as a requirement for the President of the Republic in the Constitution of the Second Republic adopted in November 1848. Under the terms of this Constitution, the President had to ‘present annually a report to the National Assembly on the current state of the Republic.’)

Instead, I’d like to suggest an alternative reading of the President’s choice of Versailles – one that draws on nineteenth-century precedent, albeit not the legitimist politics of the early Third Republic or the Bonapartism of the Second Empire.

Versailles is, above all, marketed as a royal palace. It’s why tourists clamber on to RER C in their hundreds of thousands. It’s why Kimye had a bit of their wedding there (replete with an eighteenth-century carriage ride for the happy couple. Kim and Kanye know what happened to Marie-Antoinette, right?) Most of the visitors to the Château probably don’t even notice the inscription on each wing of the palace as they walk through those golden gates.

Inscription on the front of Versailles - 'To all the glories of France' (Image: Flickr/Yann O.)

Inscription on the front of Versailles – ‘To all the glories of France’ (Image: Flickr/Yann O.)

This inscription was erected in the late 1830s during the July Monarchy (1830 – 1848), when Louis-Philippe decided to transform part of the uninhabited Château into the Musée de l’Histoire de la France (Museum of the History of France). The key word in the inscription on the front of the Château is ‘toutes’ (all). In creating the Museum Louis-Philippe was attempting to reconcile the diverse strands of French history, from monarchy to republic to Empire and into his own constitutional monarchy (supposedly described by Lafayette, following the decision to put Louis-Philippe on the throne following the July Revolution of 1830, as ‘the best of all possible republics’.)

In so doing, Louis-Philippe could also attempt to cement his own regime by ostensibly reconciling seemingly diametrically opposed political traditions and histories. As a member of the Orléans branch of the French royal family, Louis-Philippe was considered a Prince of the Blood and was a cousin of Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X (who was deposed in the July Revolution that brought Louis-Philippe to power). However, he also boasted (in every sense of the word) a revolutionary pedigree. His father, Philippe-Égalité, sat in the Convention and voted in favour of executing his cousin Louis XVI. Louis-Philippe himself served in the Revolutionary armies and fought at Valmy and Jemappes in 1792 before exiling himself from France as the Revolution entered its more radical phase.

As king of a divided people, Louis-Philippe tried to use an image of French history as diverse but unified to rally support for the new regime. The Musée de l’Histoire de la France at Versailles was central to this project. Its crowning glory is the Galerie des Batailles, decorated with busts of French military leaders from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic Wars and enormous history paintings of key battles in the history of France, from Tolbiac in 496 to Wagram in 1809. Louis-Philippe indulged his ego in the Salle de 1792, dedicated to the events and military leaders of that year, and the Salle de 1830, which combines vast paintings of the July Revolution with allegories of national reconciliation. The Salle du Sacre (Coronation Room), meanwhile, is all about Napoleon Bonaparte, featuring a full-scale copy of David’s painting of his coronation as Emperor. In 1840 Louis-Philippe gave further weight to the Napoleonic legend with the retour des cendres, the return of Napoleon’s remains to France.

Salle du Sacre

Reproduction of David’s Le Sacre de Napoléon, Salle du Sacre, Château de Versailles (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

What does all this have to do with Macron, then? In assessing his choice of Versailles it is worth remembering (his obvious love of pomp and ceremony aside) his emphasis on being neither left nor right – of occupying a political position that is centrist, but also intended to transcend political division to create a more unified whole. No doubt Macron, whose choice of the Louvre for his post-election celebration also led to accusations of monarchical tendencies, would agree with the basic premise of Louis-Philippe’s celebration of ‘toutes les gloires de la France’.

But the criticisms (and in some cases) erroneous comparisons to the ancien régime that greeted Macron’s address to the Congrès also rather obscure the many layers of meaning and symbolism embodied in a building like Versailles – or, indeed, the Louvre. Les Invalides is another case in point. This military hospital, built by Louis XIV and transformed into a Napoleonic shrine with the burial of Napoleon’s remains there in 1840 (thanks to Louis-Philippe), will on 5 July be the site of the republican state funeral for Simone Veil. These are buildings and spaces that can be simultaneously monarchist, revolutionary, imperial and republican.

‘All the world’s screens are waiting’: Abel Gance’s ‘Napoléon’ at Ninety

07 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Film, France, History, Media, Research, Revolution

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Ninety years ago today, on 7 April 1927, the greatest film ever made [1] premiered at what was then called the Théâtre national de l’Opéra, and what is now called the Opéra Garnier, in Paris. The charity gala (the proceeds were donated to charities supporting wounded veterans from the First World War) was attended by the President of the French Republic, Gaston Doumergue, as well as leading figures in the French military – including the young Charles de Gaulle and Marshal Philippe Pétain.

The screening was not uneventful. At three hours and forty minutes long, the film was far longer than promised (and was still running well after midnight). Arthur Honegger, composer of the film’s score, was forced to keep adapting the music in response to the director’s last minute edits and cuts. Several sequences had been spliced into the reels upside down, causing the panicked editor to rush to the projection box and halt the screening while she painstakingly reinserted the film. For the audience, though, the film was a triumph. During a fifteen-minute standing ovation, the cheering crowd at the Opéra acclaimed the film’s director: ‘Vive Abel Gance!’ [2]

The cover of the programme from the screenings of Napoléon at the Paris Opéra in 1927 . The programme is reproduced in the booklet accompanying the BFI’s 2016 DVD release of the film. Albert Dieudonné’s appearance in the film directly referenced the painting by Gros reproduced on the cover.

I can’t remember exactly when or how I first found out about Napoléon, though I think it was sometime around the end of my final year as an undergraduate. I might have come across a reference to the film while doing some reading for a module, or had my curiosity piqued by a still used in another context. For some reason, I keep thinking of an image of Antonin Artaud as Marat, looking for all the world like a bedraggled Studio 54 survivor in his head wrap and moulting fur-trimmed coat.

Antonin Artaud as Jean-Paul Marat. This is what I believe they call a ‘strong look’.

The more I found out about it, the more the film became a peculiar object of fascination. I went to the library and borrowed the book about the film written by Kevin Brownlow, who has worked for more than sixty years to reassemble Gance’s masterpiece and ensure its preservation for future generations. I learned how the film was supposed to have been just the first of a six-part Napoleonic epic (the rest were never made, though Gance’s papers give some indication of what would have followed)[3]. I read about the butchering of the film by various distributors, keen to make it more palatable to cinemagoers used to far shorter pictures, and how Gance’s own attempts to revisit and rework the film in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s had in some cases seriously damaged its reputation.

Gratuitous photo of Abel Gance with Brienne, the stray (cute) dog he adopted on the set of ‘Napoléon’. Brienne appears in the Toulon sequence, carried along by the revolutionary army.

Having read Brownlow’s account of the acclaimed performances of his reconstructed version in the early 1980s, further digging around online revealed an ongoing battle over rights, finally resolved in 2008, that could have prevented any further screenings (Paul Cuff, an expert on Gance, usefully documents the film’s story in this article for Sight and Sound). The film was not available on home video or DVD, save in the less-than-satisfactory versions. The chances of seeing this thing were slim. I spent nearly ten years keeping an eye on the Cinémathèque Française, hoping for a screening in Paris, and enviously reading about screenings in the US.

And then I finally saw it.

I had planned, going into the screening at the Royal Festival Hall in November 2013, to write about my experience of finally getting to see this film that I’d spent so long reading about and harping on about to whatever poor unfortunate was hapless enough to listen. I found, however, that writing coherently about something so intensely emotional was no easy task. On some level, I was overwhelmed by actually seeing Napoléon, by experiencing something I had been anticipating for years. On another, I wasn’t prepared for the effect the film and Carl Davis’s magnificent score had on me, nor for how emotional the entire day would be – beginning with meeting Kevin Brownlow at a book signing beforehand.

It was as astonishing as I had hoped, from that first appearance of the little bicorne hat in the snow to the expanse of water, across three screens, that brings the film to an end.

As the screen switched suddenly to bleu, blanc, rouge, I realised I had been holding my breath. My gut instinct told me to stand up and roar approval, but I held back for a second. Then I noticed that the elderly man to my right was celebrating like he’d won the World Cup – and I let go.

Post-screening at the Royal Festival Hall in November 2013. Out of shot: me trying to pull myself together again.

In the days that followed the screening, I was still getting over it.

(Curiously enough these sentiments were echoed, albeit more eloquently, in this article by Cuff which I’ve only recently discovered.)

In 2015, the Cinémathèque Française announced a major restoration of their version of Napoléon, due to be released this year (or so they say) with a running time of nearly six and a half hours. It is likely to be accompanied by the (by all accounts rather inferior) score by Carmine Coppola. In 2016 the BFI released a digital restoration of the film, with tinting restored, a nationwide cinema release in the UK, and – best of all – a DVD and Blu-Ray release. (I greeted this news with the calm and reasoned response befitting my profession, as you can see.)

Here’s the trailer for the digitised restoration. The close-ups! Oh my, the close-ups.

 

There were some concerns expressed by enthusiasts about the transfer to digital, and whether the film would lose its mythic status through newfound ease of access. Silent London’s review of an advance screening suggested that the finale was ‘inevitably going to be diminished’ when viewed on a TV or computer screen, and noted that the ‘joins’ in Gance’s masterpiece were rendered more visible through digitisation. In truth, I quite like seeing his handiwork, rather like being able to hone in on individual brushstrokes in a painting and then step back to appreciate the art as a whole. And, having seen (and introduced!) the digital restoration with an audience twice, I can happily report that there is simply no diminution of Napoléon’s emotional pull or cinematic magic.

I admit that I would like to see the whole thing on film, with an orchestra, at least once more in my life – if only for the sheer joy of hearing two more projectors whirr into life as the final triptych sequence approaches. When I received the DVD of the film (a complete and utter bargain which you should buy, and buy directly from the BFI) I marvelled that something so huge could be made so compact.

Concerns that being able to stick on Napoléon whenever you like will somehow undermine this masterpiece, however, are rather wide of the mark. Accessibility is giving new life to the film. Recently, I introduced Napoléon for an audience at The Witham in Barnard Castle, County Durham, an event accompanying the Bowes Museum’s ‘Allure of Napoleon’ exhibition. Right at the end, as the rushing water disappeared and was replaced with the bold tricolour, I heard the older woman sitting behind me catch her breath, sigh happily, and say ‘Oh, wow’ to no one in particular, as if this was the best thing she had ever seen. That Gance’s masterpiece is now within the reach of everyone is perhaps the best ninetieth birthday present Napoléon could have.

***

[1] This is not up for discussion.

[2] My account of the première of Napoléon is based on Kevin Brownlow’s excellent Napoleon: Abel Gance’s Classic Film (2004; first published 1983), pp137-145.

[3] Paul Cuff’s detailed study of the production of the film contains some discussion of what might have been, including the visual reference points used by Gance in planning sequences on Saint Helena. See Cuff, A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance’s ‘Napoléon’ (2015).

Radio Radio

06 Monday May 2013

Posted by in Film, Media, Research, Revolution

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Over the past while I’ve appeared a couple of times on RTE Radio 1’s The History Show, a weekly programme that aims to – as the tagline goes – ‘bring the past to life’ of a Sunday evening. I was on the show to discuss the history behind Les Misérables and, most recently, the story of Cannes and its Film Festival.

Both shows are available to download or stream via RTE’s website:

Les Misérables: History on Screen?

Cannes and its Film Festival