We set down Flaubert’s novel feeling a mixture of fear and sad-ness—at how we are all made to live before we can even begin to know how, at how limited is our understanding of ourselves and others, at how great and catastrophic are the consequences of our actions, and how often pitiless and uncompromising the responses of upstanding members of the community when we err.
7.
As members of the audience of any tragic work, whether dramatic or literary, we are as far as it is possible to get from the spirit of the headline Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic, insofar as the genre of tragedy itself will have inspired us to abandon ordinary life’s simplified perspective on failure and defeat, and rendered us infinitely more generous towards the foolishness and transgressions endemic to human nature.
A world in which a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
Comedy
1.
The summer of 1831 found King Louis-Philippe of France in a confident mood. The political and economic chaos of the July Revolution, which had brought him to power the year before, was gradually giving way to prosperity and order. He had in place a competent team of officials led by his prime minister, Casimir Périer, and on tours around the northern and eastern parts of his realm had been given a hero’s welcome by the provincial middle classes. He lived in splendour in the Palais-Royal in Paris; attended weekly banquets in his honour; loved eating (especially foie gras and game) and had a vast personal fortune and a loving wife and children.
But there was one cloud on Louis-Philippe’s otherwise sunny horizon: in late 1830, an unknown twenty-eight-year-old artist by the name of Charles Philipon had launched a satirical magazine, La Caricature, in which he now graphically transformed the head of the king (whom he also accused of corruption and incompetence on a grand scale) into a pear. Unflattering as Philipon’s cartoons were, depicting Louis-Philippe with swollen cheeks and a bulbous forehead, they carried an additional, implied disparagement: the French word poire, meaning not only “pear” but “fathead” or “mug,” neatly conveyed a less-than-respectful sentiment regarding the monarch’s administrative abilities.
Enraged by the dig, Louis-Philippe instructed his agents to stop production of the magazine and to buy up all unsold copies from Parisian kiosks. When these measures failed to deter Philipon, prosecutors in November 1831 charged him with having “caused offence to the person of the king,” and summoned him to appear in court. Speaking before a packed chamber, the caricaturist sardonically thanked the government for arresting such a dangerous man as himself, but then he suggested that the prosecutors had been negligent in their pursuit of the king’s detractors. They should make it their priority, he insisted, to go after anything in the shape of a pear; indeed, even pears themselves should be locked up. There were thousands of them on trees all over France, and every one a criminal fit for incarceration. The court was not amused. Philipon was sentenced to six months in prison, and when he dared to repeat the pear joke in a new magazine, Le Charivari, the following year, he was sent straight back to jail. In all, he spent two years behind bars for drawing the monarch as a piece of fruit.
Three decades earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte, then the most powerful man in Europe, had himself felt no less vulnerable to the prick of satire. On coming to power in 1799, he had ordered the closure of every satirical paper in Paris and told his police chief, Joseph Fouché, that he would not tolerate cartoonists’ taking liberties with his appearance. He preferred to leave his visual representation to Jacques-Louis David. He commissioned the great painter to depict him leading his armies across the Alps, looking heroic on a horse, and so pleased was he with the result—Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard (1801)—that he turned to David again to record the apogee of his triumphs, his coronation in Notre-Dame in December 1804. It was an occasion of high pomp: all the grandees of France were gathered, Pope Pius VII officiated and delegations had been dispatched by most European countries to pay their respects. Jean-François Lesueur had composed a suitably imposing score. Blessing Napoleon, the pope called out across the hushed cathedral, “Vivat imperator in aeternam.”
Upon completing his rendition of the scene, Le Sacre de Joséphine, in November 1807, David offered it “to my illustrious master.” A jubilant Napoleon made the painter an officer of the Legion of Honour in recognition of his “services to art” and proclaimed to him, as he pinned the medal on his chest, “You have brought good taste back to France.”
Not all artists, however, saw Napoleon as David did. A couple of years before the unveiling of Le Sacre de Joséphine, the English caricaturist James Gillray had published a very different view of the event, which he entitled The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st Emperor of France (1805). But there was never any talk of awarding him the Legion of Honour for restoring good taste to France.
Jacques-Louis David, Le Sacre de Joséphine, 1807
Gillray’s drawing shows a preening, swollen, strutting emperor at the head of a parade of flunkies, flatterers and prisoners. Pope Pius VII is pictured, but he is hardly the holy man of David’s version: here, the papal robes shelter a choirboy, who lets slip his mask to reveal the face of the devil. Josephine, far from the fresh-faced damsel David would paint, is an acne-scarred balloon. Carrying the train of the emperor are representatives from the countries already conquered by Napoleon—Prussia, Spain and Holland—whose participation does not appear to be precisely voluntary. Behind them are rows of shackled French soldiers, their condition indicating that this is not an emperor to whom the people have given power willingly. Keeping these last in line is Police Chief Fouché, stepping out smartly and, as Gillray explained in the caption, “bearing the Sword of Justice,” which is coated with blood.