With this last word the circle of ideas making up the cultural ambient of the French Revolution might seem to be complete. However, in the effort to trace back and interweave the strands of feeling and opinion that make up populism, one must not overlook the first political axiom of revolutionary thought, which is the recognition of individual rights. Their source and extent is a subject for political theory. The recognition of the individual goes with the assertion that his freedom rests on natural law, a potent idea, as we know who have witnessed the vast extension of rights far beyond their first, political meaning. Here the concern is with their cultural role, which can be simply stated: individual rights generate individualism and magnify it. That -ism denotes both an attitude and a doctrine, which together amount to a passionate belief: every human being is an object of primary interest to himself and in himself; he is an end in himself, not a means to the welfare of class or state or to other group purposes. Further, the truly valuable part of each individual is his uniqueness, which he is entitled to develop to the utmost, free of oppression from the government or from his neighbours. That is why the state guarantees the citizen rights as against itself and other citizens. Again, this power accrues to him for himself because he is inherently important—not because he is son or father, peasant or overlord, member of a clan or a guild.
These ideas shift the emphasis of several thousand years of social beliefs and let loose innumerable consequences. Individualism lowers the value of tradition and puts a premium on originality; it leads to the now familiar “cult of the new”—in art, manners, technology, and social and political organization. True, the individual soul had long been held unique and precious by Christian theology, but Christian society had not extended the doctrine to every man’s mundane comings and goings. Nor were his practical rights and powers attached to him as a man but, rather, to his status. Now the human being as such was being officially considered self-contained and self-propelling; it was a new regime and its name was liberty. Nature of the changes
The contents and implications of these powerful words—liberty, equality, and fraternity, individualism and populism, simplicity and naturalness—enable us to delineate the cultural situation of Europe at the dawn of the era under review. Yet these continuing ideas necessarily modified each other and in different times and countries were subject to still other influences.
For example, the active phase of the revolution in France—say, 1789 to 1804—was influenced by the classical education of most of its public men. They had been brought up on Roman history and the tales of Plutarch’s republican heroes, so that when catapulted into a republic of their own making, the symbols and myths of Rome were often their most natural means of expression. The eloquence of the successive national assemblies is full of Roman allusions. Later, when General Bonaparte let it be seen that he meant to rule France, he was denounced in the Chamber as a Caesar; when he succeeded, he took care to make himself consul (a title of the ancient Roman Republic), flanked by two other consuls of lesser rank. The title was meant to show that no Caesar was in prospect.
In the fine arts this Roman symbolism facilitated a thorough change of taste and technique. The former “grand style” of painting had been derived from royal and aristocratic elegance, and its allusions to the ancient Classical past were gentle and distant, architectural and mythological. Now, under the leadership of the painter David, the great dramatic scenes of ancient history were portrayed in sharp, uncompromising outlines that struck the beholder as the utmost realism of the day.
In David’s Death of Socrates and Oath of the Horatii civic and military courage are the respective subjects; in his pencil sketches of the victims of the Terror as they were led to execution, reportorial realism dominates; and, in his designs for the setting of huge popular festivals, David, in collaboration with the musicians Méhul and Grétry, provided the first examples of an art in scale with the new populism: the courtly taste for intimate elegance and subtle manners gave way to the more striking, less polished large-scale feelings of a proud nation.
Oath of the Horatii, oil painting by Jacques-Louis David, 1784; in the Louvre, Paris.Giraudon/Art Resource, New York
It must be added, however, that except for a few canvases and a few tunes (including the “Marseillaise”) the quality of French Revolutionary art was not on a par with its aspirations. Literature in particular showed the limitations under which revolutionary artists must work: political doctrine takes precedence over truth, and the broad effects required to move the masses encourage banality. There is no French poetry in this period except the odes of Chénier, whom the revolution promptly guillotined, as it did France’s greatest scientist, Lavoisier. The French stage was flourishing but not with plays that can still be read. The revolutionary playwrights only increased the dose of sentiment and melodrama that had characterized plays at the close of the old regime. The aim was to hold up priests and kings to execration and to portray examples of superhuman courage and virtue. Modern operagoers who know the plot of Beethoven’s Fidelio can judge from that sample what the French theatre of the revolutionary years thrived on. Others can imagine for themselves Molière’s Misanthrope rewritten so as to make Alceste a pure patriot and hero, undermined by the intrigues of the vile courtier Philinte.
It may seem odd that once the revolution was under way there should be such persistent indignation and protest against courtiers, priests, and kings and such fulsome homage paid to virtue and patriotism. What accounts for it is the difficulty of transforming culture overnight. People have to be persuaded out of old habits—and must keep on persuading themselves. Even politically, the revolution proceeded by phases and experienced regressions. Manners and customs themselves did not change uniformly, as one can see from portraits of Robespierre at the height of his power wearing a short wig and knee breeches, republican and Rousseauist though he was. Napoleon’s influence
After Bonaparte’s coup d’état, tension eased as the high revolutionary ideals dropped to a more workaday level, just as the puritanism was replaced by moral license. The general’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 before his self-elevation to power introduced a new style competing with the ancient Roman in costume and furnishings; the Middle East became fashionable and out of the cultural contact came the new science of Egyptology. The Roman idea itself shifted from republic to empire as the successful general and consul Bonaparte made himself into the emperor Napoleon in 1804.
The emperor had an extraordinary capacity for attending to all things, and he was concerned that his regime should be distinguished in the arts. He accordingly gave them a sustained patronage such as a revolutionary party rent by internal struggles could not provide. Napoleon, nonetheless, had tastes of his own, and he had to control public opinion besides. In literature (he had been a poet and writer of novels in his youth), he relished the Celtic legends of Ossian and encouraged his official composer Lesueur in the composition of the opera Ossian ou les Bardes. In painting, he favoured the surviving David and the younger men Gros and Géricault, both “realists” concerned with perpetuating the colour and drama of imperial life. But to depict matters of contemporary importance on the stage (except perhaps in the ballet, which was flourishing) did not prove possible, for the stage must present genuine moral conflict if it is to produce great works, and moral issues are not discussable under a political censorship.