Episodes in Political Illusion: The Proliferation of War Imagery in France (1804-1856).

Abstract

This dissertation investigates a neglected, yet central component of nineteenth-century visual culture in France, namely the proliferation of war imagery across a range of established and emergent visual forms including painting, printmaking, battle panoramas, illustrated newspapers and photography. Far from mere reflections of the propagandistic aims of state power, representations of war produced between the First Napoleonic Empire and the Crimean War (1804-1856), the first major armed conflict to break out on European soil since the wars of the First Napoleonic Empire, depended on a wide range of belief systems beyond officially-sponsored political agendas. Throughout this dissertation, I situate war imagery as a material and discursive platform which not only informed perceptions about war and peace, but also implicated a larger set of contemporary issues as diverse as the development of liberal political doctrines, imperialism, industrial modes of production and the interaction of early forms of mass culture with more established media such as painting over the course of the nineteenth century. While art historical studies of representations of war have predominately focused on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods and on the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and his students, the present study focuses on a corpus of works (and their relevant reproductions) by artists who have fallen outside the purview of the dominant interpretations of nineteenth-century artistic production in France, including the battle painters Louis-François Lejeune, Carle Vernet, Horace Vernet, the war artist Henri Durand-Brager and the panoramist Jean-Charles Langlois. In addition to focusing on the interrelations which existed between different media used to picture war, I identify a set of formal strategies used by artists to compose and picture armed combat in order to make it appear legible and engaging. Through an array of archival and primary sources, including Salon criticism, government documents, diaries, letters and newspaper articles, I argue that the visual representations of war produced by these artists invited spectators to consume war at a remove, as a series of affective and appealing images.