Classicism, nationalism and history: The Prix decennaux of 1810 and the politics of art under post-revolutionary empire.

Abstract

Designed by Napoleon to reward the best cultural achievements of the past decade, the Prix decennaux competition represented the state's unprecedented attempt retrospectively to define French culture in the aftermath of the Revolution. However, concours and juries had engendered controversy since 1789. Not surprisingly, the decennial competition's art exhibition and published jury report created opportunities for critics to resist the notion of an uncontested, coherent official culture. Institutional and personal histories led to the Institut jury's decision to nominate prize-winners directly at odds with the Emperor's wishes. In the end. David's Intervention of the Sabines (1799) and Coronation (1807), and Gros's Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804) were overshadowed by Girodet's A Scene of a Deluge (1806). Bifurcating ambitious painting into history painting and painting honorable to the national character, the Prix decennaux raised uneasy questions about the relation between the inherited French classical tradition and a modern national identity. Even in 1799, classicism had been compromised by David's attempt to appeal to a commercial audience in his Sabines. At the center of the scandal was the nudity of the painting's male protagonists. Depicting a colonial encounter in the Orient, Gros's Jaffa exploited the crisis in the residual authority of the classical nude in order to vitalize an emergent nationalist iconography in service of the Napoleonic regime. Girodet's Deluge represents an ambitious attempt to resurrect peinture d'histoire and the sacrificed heroic nude in a tableau that distanced itself, however, from historical commemoration. Likened to melodrama, this histrionic image catalyzed anxieties about cultural decline and post-Revolutionary society's taste for violence. However, Royalists championed the Deluge because it resisted Napoleon's subordination of art to mere instrumentality. While these complex paintings exceeded the roles the Institut and Napoleon intended them to play, their interpretation was significantly modified by the structure of the decennial prizes. The Deluge dominated debate in ways that not only overrode the raison d'etre of traditional history painting but also subordinated the national subjects.