Contents:
La poesia lucreziana, Convivium, XIV, , p. Wimmel, Kallimachos in Rom. Sabinum Villa de Sabine: Tel est le cas de G. Maecenas, Iena, Neuenhahn, , p. Gardthausen, Augustus und seine Zeit, I, 2, p. Avallone, Educazione letteraria di Mecenate, Euphrosyne, I, , p. Frank, Vergil, a biography, p. On trouve cette attitude chez V. Giuffrida, L'Epicureismo nella lettera- tura latina nel I secolo av. II, Torino, , p. Tes- cari, Lucretiana, cf.
Pasquali, Orazio lirico, p. Caton en avait fait le pivot de son argumentation dans le Pro Rhodien- sibus. Hoc istae ambages compositionis, hoc uerba transuersa, hoc sensus inibi magni quidem saepe, sed eneruati dum exeunt, cuiuis manifestum facient: Dans III, 16, 29 sq. Paratore, Spunti lucreziani nelle Georgiche, Atene e Roma, , p. Cumont, Les Religions Orientales Odes, III, 25, etc. Bickel, De Elegiis in Mae- cenatem Outre la Mort cf. Wili, Festschrift Tieche, p. Marx, , , p.
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Odes, III, 21, Bickel, De Elegiis in Maecenatem De Maecenate artem uoce canendi una cum Horatio in Esquiliis exercente. Je la crois plus vraisemblable que celle de R. Latomus, XIX, qui traduit cantus v. Il s'agit de chant, cf. Odes, IV, 11, 33 sq. Dans le De Oratore, II, 21 sq. Satires, II, 6, On verra que cette Fortuna gubernans De rer. The summum bonum fallacy, The Classical Weekly, vol. To Epicurus ' the greatest good ' was not pleasure but life itself. Kallimachos in Rom, Wiesbaden, i, p.
Properce, III, 2, 19 sq. Nous montrons plus bas, chapitre 11, p. Reine, VIII, 1, , col. Horace, Odes, I, i, 2 et II, 17, 4: Horum tnihi nihil accidisset, si aut Agrippa aut Maecenas uixissent! Dion Cassius, LV, 7. Cum diceret partent adulescentis Latro et tractaret adop- tionis locum, dixit: Maecenas innuit Latroni festinare Caesarem ; finiret iam decla- mationem.
Quidam putabant hanc malignitatem Maecenatis esse ; effedsse enitn illum non ne audiret quae dicta erant Caesar, sed ut notaret. Voir plus haut, p. Pexisti capillum naturae muneribus gratum. Il faut bien distinguer entre l'existence de la? Sur ces statues, cf. La confrontation avec D. Regionis Quintae Nomen, Situs atque compen- diariae Descriptiones, p. Horti Maecenatis et Auditorium. Inducit Priapum, qui stat in horti s Esquilinis, dicentem La Laus Pisonis, vers sq. Kroll, Maecenatis auditorium, R-E, col. Gardthausen, tout en supposant l'existence de villas rustiques p.
Odes, III, 29, 9 sq. Dion Cassius, LV, 7, 6. Voir la mise au point de R. Odes, III, 29, Odes, I, 35, Consulter le commentaire de G. Quod uitium hominis esse interdum, interdum temporis solet Id. Non ille, quamquam Socraticis madet Sermonibus, te negleget horridus Heurgon, La vie quotidienne Dans IX, 1, ext. XXXIV, 4, souligne la confusion habituelle entre luxuria graeca et luxuria asiatica.
Servius, Ad A en. Sur le pergraecari comique, cf. I, Paris, , p. Sur cette notion au sens politique, cf. Digeste, 1, XII, Albertini, L'Empire Romain, indique la date de Nous sommes en 26 av. Num minus Vrbis erat custos et Caesaris opses? XXXV, Bruxelles, , p. Reck- ford, Horace and Maecenas, Trans.
Buchan, Augus- ius, London, , p. Appien, V, 6, 53 cf. Sur la question, voir aussi Cambridge Ancient History, X, p. Cocceius, Appien, BC, V, 7, 7 sq. Appien, V, 7, Sur l'entrevue de Tarente, cf. Appien, BC, V, 10, II, 98, 3 L. La vita economica e sociale, p. Cet ami de Caton d'Utique Plutarque, Brut. Avallone, Educazione letteraria di Mecenate, p. Maecenatis fragmentis, Lipsiae, 1, cap. Avallone, Mecenate - Iframmenti, Salerno, , p. Millar, qui signale ces rapprochements, op. Olivieri, Teubner, Lipsiae, The good princeps according to Philodemus.
Grenade, Essai sur les Origines du Principat, p. Satires, II, 6, 89 sq. Sur l'extension de la pantomime, devenue un spectacle autonome vers 23 av. Weinreich, Senecas Apocolocyntosis, Berlin, Weidmann, , p. Sur Auguste-Jupiter chez Horace, cf. Odes, I, 12, 51 et 57 ; III, 4, 42 sq. La formule de LU, 35, 2: Odes, III, 2, 21 sq. Heinze, Die augusteische Kultur, Teubner, , p. Wili, Horaz und die augusteische Kultur: Cerf aux et J. Odes, IV, 14, 4: Levi, II tempo di Augusto Appendici, 6. Fabia, Les Sources de Tacite, p. Nous trouvons ailleurs des malices d'Horace. Grimal, Les intentions de Properce La satire I, 63 sq.
Mais la satire VII, 90 sq. Calpurnii Siculi De laude Pisonis et Bucolica Vipsanius a Maecenate eum Vergilium suppositum appellabat nouae cacozeliae repertorem, non tumidae nec exilis, sed ex cotnmunibus uerbis atque ideo latentis. Il est rejoint par L. Herrmann, Les Masques et les Visages Il convient de ne pas oublier que Properce, avec malice, emploie dans III, 9, 60 l'expression in partis tuas. Notamment celles du prooemium du chant III. Vergilius Maro, Stuttgart, , col. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa, 1, , p. Maecenatis frag- rneniis, Lipsiae, 1.
Avallone, dans son Mecenate, p. I frammenti, Salerno, Il nous a paru indispensable de donner en appendice un catalogue des Fragments. Sur le candidus iudex, cf. Albi candide iudex, sens analogue. On trouvera dans Avallone, Educazione letteraria Solebat autem Fuscus ex Vergilio multa trahere, ut Maecenati imputaret: Odes, III, 8, 6: Satires, I, 10, 17 sq. Usener- Radermacher, I, , p. Rhys Roberts, Dionysius of Halicarnassus. The three literary letters, Cambridge, , p. Horace vise Properce dans Epist. Sur l'ensemble de la question, voir W.
Nunc, Dea, nunc succurre mihi Il s'agit de Sabinus Clodius, Contr. Sabinus Clodius, in quem uno die et Graece et Latine declamantem multa urbane dicta sunt. Sur ces invitations, voir Pasquali, Orazio lirico, p. Mustilli, Il Museo Mussolini, 9, p. Tibulle, II, 1, 55 ; Horace, Epist. Ou de Calliope, cf. Calliope requies hominum diuomque uoluptas. Outre la satire I, 10, il faut citer Sat. Melissus, qui de apibus scripsit Rostagni, Scritti Minori, I, p.
On ne voit pas pourquoi Melissus H. Rostagni, Virgilio Minore, p. I , qui se retrouve chez R. Hirzel, Der Dialog, II, p.
Keil, Grammatici Latini, I, p. Properce, III, 9 selon W. Rostagni, Scritti Minori, II, 2, p. Odes, II, 12, De Poetis, A. Properce, II, 34, Virgile, Culex, vers Rostagni, Sulle trace di un' estetica dell'intuizione Varron et les laudes maiorum. Mtis, XCIX, , p. Vergilius Maro, R-E, col. On sait que R. Laus Pisonis, sq. Pour le commentaire, cf. Pelidae stomachum cedere nescii, nec cursus duplicis per mare Ulixei Horace, Odes, III, 5: Bue, III, 84 sq.
Il y a quelque malice, si l'on se reporte au prooemium de III, dans la justification du vers Je ne puis me convaincre que M. Morborum quoque te causas et signa docebo III, 3, 13 sq. Telle est aussi la conclusion de W. Wimmel, Kallimachos in Rom, p. II, 1, vers Warde Fowler dans l'ode IV, 5, 31 sq.
Serus in caelum redeas Dans les deux cas, il s'agit d'une adaptation subtile de Yadynaton alexandrin, mais Yadynaton devient allusion cruelle chez Properce, alors qu'il reste badinage rassurant chez Horace. Pour la citation, ibid. Grimai Les intentions de Properce Le badinage erotique de Properce pourrait heurter la morale sociale du principat: Essai de biographie spirituelle Editeur: Textes d'auteurs anciens [startPage] [endPage] II. De 46 au 18 avril 44 Avril 43 Octobre 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 2 septembre 31 Batailles de Philippes.
Confiscation des biens de Favonius. Mariage d'Octave et de Scribonie. Plerumque gratae diuitibus uices mundaeque paruo sub lare fauferum cenae sine aulaeis et ostro sollicitam explicuere frontem. Proinde ubi se uideas hominem indignarier iftsum Post mortem fore ut aut putescat corpore posto Aut flammis interfiat malisue ferarum Viuitur ingenio, cetera mortis erunt Pieridas Phoebumque colens in mollibus hortis sederat argutas garrulus inter auesz.
Fastidiosam desere copiam et molem propinquam nubibus arduis, omitte mirari beatae fumum et opes strepitumque Romae. Maecenas quantopere eum dilexerit satis testatur illo epigram- mate: Huic pares sunt apud Maecenatem: Sed quo magis hic versus, quod matri sacer est Idaeae, vibrare videatur, proximum ab ultimo pedem brachysyllabon fecerunt et Graeci et hic ipse Maecenas iis quos modo rettuli proximum sic: Siquis autem quaesierit quid ita, cum sit galliambicus versus, iambici quoque nomen acceperit, hoc versu, qui est apud Maecenatem, lecto intelleget eum ex iambico quoque trimetro nasci: Van Krevelen, Hilversum, Bernardakis, Lipsiae, , 7 vol.
Buchan, Augustus, London, Gardthausen, Augustus und seine Zeit, Leipzig, 1 Holmes, The architect ofthe Roman Empire, Oxford, 1. Levi, II tempo di Augusto, Firenze, 1. Bibliographie des auteurs modernes J. Bignone, L'Aristotele perduto e la formazione filosofica di Epicuro, Firenze, Cumont, Les religions orientales dans l'Empire romain, Paris, Frank, Vergil, a biography, Oxford, Fraenkel, Horace, Oxford, Clarendon, Maecenas, Iena, Neuenhahn, Rostagni, Virgilio Minore, Torino, Aelius Seianus, Phoenix, XV, , p.
Weinreich, Senecas Apocolocyntosis, Berlin, Weidmann, Wili, Horaz und die augusteische Kultur, Basel, Homo nouus, Homines noui: Sur le grand discours de , cf. Tel est le catalogue retenu par R. Morborum quoque te causas et signa docebo. Satires, II, 8, III, 18, 27 sq. Odes, II, 17, 5: Les vers , cf. Sur cette fides politique, voir Properce, II, 1, 36 et El. Dion Cassius, LIV, 6, 5. Voir sur ce point R.
Odes, III, 16, Grimal, Les fardins Romains Grimal, Les Jardins Romains Se reporter au De Breu. Severed from the person of the king, revolutionary law was at once depersonalized and venerated as the expression of the general will. This veneration was expressed in representations of the constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in the roundheaded form traditionally associated with the Ten Commandments. Having provided France with the means to its regeneration, the Constituent Assembly was succeeded, in , by the Legislative Assembly, mandated to make laws in accordance with the constitution.
Honor to the citizen who remains loyal to it! Triumph to the magistrate who knows how to die for it! May one cherish it, may one fear it! New French people, march, march under its sign! It is tempting to view the tablets worn by the Legislative Assembly as a transposition of the Christian doctrine of grace triumphant over law. For the era of constitutional law had superseded the rule of the monarchy by divine grace. Reference to the tablets of Moses was all the more appropriate in that revolutionary law was intended to share the brevity and immutability of the Ten Commandments.
The revolutionaries' veneration of tablets addressed the emotional void opened when the law was dissociated from the person of the monarch and attached to the written text. When Gilbert Romme and his Tennis Court Society celebrated the first anniversary of the Tennis Court Oath, a bronze tablet, inscribed with the oath and borne like a "sacred ark" by four Bastille combatants, was carried onto the holy ground of the Versailles tennis court and affixed to the wall.
The sanctity of the law was repeatedly belied by the relentless political instability and violence of the s. The king played an integral role in the governmental mechanism defined by the Constitution of But that document, unable to survive the increasingly radical course of the Revolution, became obsolete less. In September the Legislative Assembly was dissolved, the monarchy abolished, and France declared a republic.
The National Convention was assembled to write a new constitution, which, unlike that of , would be submitted to a nationwide vote of confidence. Even the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was not spared: To lend prestige to the new constitution, the government held the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility on August 10, , the anniversary of the monarchy's collapse. The spectacle was at once steeped in a serene primitivist vision of rebirth and aflame with regicidal anger, thus anticipating the coupling of lofty civic zeal with unthinkable crime during the Reign of Terror.
Far from unified as it confronted the armed might of the monarchic powers of Europe, France was torn by civil war. But as Mona Ozouf has pointed out, the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility made no reference to the conflicts that imperiled the nation. The festivities commenced at the former site of the Bastille before a fountain of regeneration, represented by a colossal Egyptoid figure of Nature from whose breasts flowed water.
This drink was shared by members of the nation's Primary Assemblies—the regional assemblies that, according to the new constitution, would vote on laws as well as choose the citizens who would elect the national legislature. These delegates carried bouquets of wheat and fruit to symbolize the "sublime alliance.
Fortuna saeuo laeta negotio Embodied in David's rigorously choreographed demonstration of unanimity is a cherished revolutionary belief, proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen: I do not know whether any parliament. From time to time there is some shooting under our windows. To accommodate subjects that Delacroix could not have found there, however, Hersey was compelled to extrapolate from Vico's text. II, 1, vers Usener- Radermacher, I, , p.
The phrase "axe of the law," moreover, could have been uttered only when the law had been resolutely depersonalized, severed from the person of the king, as it had been, gruesomely, with the decapitation of Louis XVI, January 21, The festivities concluded at the Champ-de-Mars where, only three years earlier, the Festival of the Federation had celebrated the fidelity of the king and the nation to the previous constitution. Documentation of France's acceptance of the new constitution was placed on the Altar of the Fatherland and the constitution was enclosed in a cedar ark, as if it bore the very words of Jehovah.
Such biblical rhetoric struck a common chord with the Constitution of , whose final article states that the text of the constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen are "engraved on tablets in the midst of the assembly and in public places.
And the Mount Sinai allusion flattered the radical section of the Convention popularly known as the Mountain because its members sat on the highest benches of the assembly hall. Such was the value the revolutionaries placed on tangible representations of the law that objects bearing the imprint of outdated laws, viewed as abominations, were subject to official vandalism.
On April 25, , the Convention ordered the exhumation and mutilation of the tablet with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the volume of the Constitution of deposited in the foundation of a projected monument on the former site of the Bastille. These objects were now deemed "contrary to the general system of liberty [and] equality of the one and indivisible Republic. The exhumed objects, Romme specified, "will be broken at the site and the fragments deposited in the national archives as a historical monument.
Like David's Tennis Court Oath the monument to national unity that could not be completed in the face of political discord—these forlorn objects negate the revolutionary myth of the permanence and sanctity of the law. The Constitution of was never put into effect following its poetic consecration at the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility. In the final act of a popular theater spectacle written by two members of the Convention and based on the festival of August 10 a citizen sang: Your salutary influence will soon dissipate the illusions of the peoples of the earth!
The survival of the Republic of Virtue demanded a stronger executive power than that defined by the new constitution. While France suffered the despotism of the. Committee of Public Safety, the Constitution of was kept in reserve. It remained in the Convention's assembly hall, safely enclosed in its cedar ark. The dictatorship of the legislature, initiated by the Constituents and brought to a terrible climax during the Terror, ended with the reaction of Thermidor. Robespierre was guillotined, and France was given yet another constitution. The Constitution of Year III August 22, —it lasted almost five years, longer than any other revolutionary constitution—opened with a Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen, among which was the pronouncement that "no one is a good man if he does not frankly and religiously observe the laws" art.
This homage to the revolutionary cult of law, however, was not backed by confidence in the nation's legislators. A five-member Directory held executive authority, and the legislature was cautiously divided into two separate assemblies. Identification medals by Nicolas-Marie Gatteaux , distributed to members of the two legislative chambers, display the familiar revolutionary iconography of the law: Mosaic tablets, inscribed with the title of the new constitution, are superimposed on the level of equality and encircled by a serpent biting its tail, emblematic of "the long destinies of the republic and the stability of its legislation" Fig.
Hatred of the legislature had shadowed the development of representative government in France since the days of the Constituent Assembly. But popular French anti-parliamentarianism reached a new intensity during the summer and fall of , when the Convention was purged of its radical element and the directorial Constitution of Year III was instituted. From the outset, the revolutionary legislative record was the subject of a formidable literature of denunciation.
For these critics Rousseau's lofty notion of the lawgiver set into relief the weakness of the Assembly. The most resounding attack came from across the English Channel. Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France , reprinted eleven times within a year of its appearance in , established a position that became a mainstay of the French Right. Burke denied that a constitution could be "made," insisting.
Burke's Reflections were applauded by the counter-revolutionary French journal Acts of the Apostles. Louis XVI to submit to their "ghastly laws. This caricature engages the revolutionaries in a grotesque stage farce, complete with orchestra and fanciful Asiatic scenery. Counter-revolutionary caricaturists treated the revolutionary motif of the roundheaded tablets of the law with similar derision. Consider, for example, a curious allegorical tondo dedicated to the radical Jacobin Club, originally called the Society of the Friends of the Constitution Fig.
Its summit obscured by clouds, this monument to folly stands amid an oppressive clutter of emblems. Flames rise from an altar whose serpent of eternity bears a suspiciously goose-like head. The tablets of the Ten Commandments and a bound volume that probably represents the Constitution of are pressed close to the adoring amphibians. A more ominous transformation of the tablets of the law occurs in The New Calvary Fig.
There, a stately personification of the nation uses the scepter of legislative power to engrave a roster of revolutionary reforms on colossal roundheaded tablets of the law suspended from a fasces. The New Calvary transforms these revolutionary emblems into instruments of torture. The roundheaded tablets of revolutionary law served as a butt for the black humor of the British caricaturist James Gillray in The Apotheosis of Hoche , an apocalyptic travesty of Hoche's funeral, September 19, Fig.
In a grotesque mimicry of the civilizing legislator-poet Orpheus, Hoche plays a guillotine-lyre above a devastated landscape amid a satanic host of sans-culotte cherubim. Between two apocalyptic beasts are roundheaded tablets inscribed with a satanic inversion of the Ten Commandments. Burke's attack on the Revolution was seconded in loftier terms by Joseph de Maistre in Considerations sur la France , a book then little known in France but esteemed by the exiled aristocracy.
Maistre, who later wrote an essay condemning the very idea of written law, had unbounded contempt for revolutionary legislation. Although he considered Rousseau "perhaps the most mistaken man in the world," Maistre agreed with the author of The Social Contract that durable institutions must have a divine basis. France, it is by the noise of infernal songs, the blasphemies of atheism, the cries of death and long groans of innocence with its throat cut, by the light of conflagrations, on the debris of the throne and altars, watered by the blood of the best of kings and an innumerable crowd of other victims.
Against these horrors Maistre held up divine Providence, which would lead France back to its ancienne constitution. Maistre's caustic brilliance had a ponderous counterpart in the theoretical writing of Viscount Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise de Bonald In accord with pre-revolutionary usage, Bonald defined constitution as the traditional, patriarchal, and Catholic order of monarchic society.
He regarded the very idea of a man-made constitution as absurd. I believe it possible to demonstrate that man can no more give a constitution to religious or political society than he can give weight to the body or extension to matter and that, far from being able to constitute society, man, by his intervention. Bonald held up Catholicism and monarchy as the foundations of an immutable social order revealed by God "the supreme Legislator" through the miracle of language. Napoleon was supposedly so impressed by the treatise that he wrote to Bonald, offering to have the government pay for a new edition.
Revolutionary law received its ultimate insult on 19 brumaire, Year VIII November 10, , the day after the abrupt transfer of the two legislative councils from Paris to Saint-Cloud. The official interpretation of Bonaparte's confrontation with the legislature is represented in a print by Isidore-Stanislas Helman that shows the general beset—like Julius Caesar or the betrayed Christ—by a mob brandishing daggers Fig.
France emerged from a decade of revolutionary strife hungering for order. The theorist who in a more innocent phase of the Revolution had been a leading advocate of the nation's constituent power and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen was willing to take drastic measures to end the lawlessness of directorial France. To his dismay and that of his collaborators, Napoleon, whom they had envisioned as a mere instrument to effect constitutional change, was unwilling to share the power seized by force. With this uncompromising attitude and the backing of his loyal army Napoleon could not be resisted.
The dictator was at once a child of the Revolution and a grandson of the Old Regime. Though he continued the Revolution's war against the European monarchies and realized the dream of a rationally ordered and centralized France regulated by a single code of civil law, Napoleon returned the nation to Catholicism and had himself crowned as emperor.
In Napoleonic France, moreover, the. The revolutionary legislators were too busy making and destroying constitutions to fulfill the intention, stated in the Constitution of , that the nation be provided with a "code of civil laws, common to all the kingdom. Although some great jurists of the Old Regime had attempted to unify the nation's welter of customary law followed in the northern half of France , written Roman law followed in the Midi , and royal ordinances, [4] the task required the centralized administrative vigor of Napoleonic France.
In Jacques-Louis David depicted Napoleon as a tireless legislator in a portrait commissioned by Alexander Douglas, a Scottish nobleman, art collector, and admirer of Bonaparte Plate 4. It is almost 4: Napoleon, the artist explained, had spent the night absorbed in his work on the code; having ceased his labor, he stands alert, ready to buckle on his sword and review his troops. On the chair and table a sword and the rolled code symbolize Napoleon's accomplishments as warrior and lawmaker, which Louis de Fontanes, the president of the imperial Legislative Body, was fond of invoking.
Napoleon presided over more than half of the sessions in which the work of the Civil Code commission was discussed before the Council of State. Notwithstanding his lack of legal sophistication, he contributed to the code's emphasis on paternal authority and the protection of property. Appointed minister of religion in , he had been deeply involved in directing French religious affairs since the signing of the Concordat with the Vatican in It was appropriate that this pious jurist was both minister of religion and chief drafter of the Civil Code, for Napoleonic France inherited from the revolutionary legislators a quasi-religious attitude toward the law.
Although Napoleon's legal expert was nearly as blind as Justice he squints weakly in his official regalia in Claude Gautherot's portrait, Fig. Portalis and his associates wanted a code that, like Roman law, would be a universally valid expression of "written reason.
Accordingly, they avoided innovation and attempted to strike a compromise between Roman law, custom, royal ordinances, and revolutionary legislation. Although Napoleon regarded the code as one of his principal achievements, he was disturbed by its dryness, which confirmed his belief that the "vice of our modern legislators is an inability to speak to the imagination.
Official demonstrations of amazement and gratitude were in order. In gratitude for the Civil Code, the Legislative Body decreed that a bust of Bonaparte be placed in the midst of their assembly hall in the Palais-Bourbon.
On the advice of Vivant Denon, Napoleon's chief artistic director, the commission was given to Antoine-Denis Chaudet As an engraving of Chaudet's lost statue indicates, this work gave the "restorer of laws" an appropriately august bearing Fig. Numa—the legendary second king of Rome, whose laws were. The Egyptian god Isis and the mythic demigod Manco-Capac, who brought civilization to the Incas, are peculiar iconographic elements, not included in a preserved bronze-cast sketch.
These figures were apparently added as arcane references to the divine nature of legislative genius.
The aggrandizement of Napoleon's personal stature as lawgiver in Chaudet's statue and Moitte's relief group represented a departure from the revolutionary tradition of honoring the law. Even though the legislature exercised a dictatorship until the fall of Robespierre, the revolutionary notion that law was the expression of the general will theoretically divested legislators of individual political authority; they were but vehicles through which the general will of the nation was realized.
Between the Tennis Court Oath and the Directory, revolutionary politics had been dominated by the legislature. But Napoleon—who seized power through an act of anti-parliamentary violence—almost obliterated the power and autonomy of the legislature and reinstated pre-revolutionary executive power with a vengeance. In he bluntly characterized his position: The Napoleonic practice of inscribing Bonaparte's name in the constitution reflected this personalization of the law.
Whereas the revolutionary constitutions had upheld Rousseau's insistence that law remain unsullied by particulars, the Constitution of Year VIII cited the three consuls by name, and the imperial Constitution of Year XII May 18, specified the positions of Napoleon's heirs in the line of succession to the throne. The tribune Georges-Antoine Chabot known as Chabot de l'Allier announced the new title to the Legislative Body, justifying the official use of what had long been used "spontaneously" by pointing out how the emperor, with his "triumphant hands," had established France's civil laws:.
He was constantly seen participating in the discussion [of the code]. He consistently displayed knowledge that astonished the most consummate jurists and established all [of the code's] fundamental principles through the comprehensive workings of a creative genius to which nothing seems foreign. In a contention alien to the depersonalized notion of the law embraced by the legislators of the Revolution, l'Allier insisted that Napoleon's greatness would guarantee the durability of the code: In , when the nation was voting to make Napoleon consul for life, an enthusiastic admirer denounced, in verse, the "timid laws" that would limit the duration of Bonaparte's rule.
Even under the Directory, Napoleon had nursed ominous plans for the nation's legislators. In he told his future foreign minister Talleyrand that the ideal legislature would be "without rank in the Republic, impassive, without eyes and without ears," that it would "no longer swamp us with a thousand circumstantial laws that annul themselves by their absurdity and constitute us a nation with three hundred volumes-in-folio of laws. Napoleon first unleashed his hostility toward the revolutionary legislative tradition in his authoritarian Constitution of Year VIII, which divided the process of legislation—introduction, deliberation, and voting—among three bodies: The Senate chose members for each of the three and served as a tribunal for constitutional questions.
Legislation was initiated by the "government"—that is, the first consul with the advice of his administrative court, the Council of State. The Tribunate—purged in after resisting the first project of the Civil Code commission—discussed the proposed laws but could not vote on them. The Legislative Body voted on measures presented to it by the Tribunate but was barred from deliberation, under pain of discipline. The mute and generally docile Legislative Body, composed largely of obscure but now affluent former revolutionaries, was thus a mere shadow of the great revolutionary legislative assemblies.
The dictatorship initiated by the Constitution of Year VIII was strengthened by amendments that make up two additional constitutions. According to the Constitution of Year X measures enacted August 2 and 4, Napoleon, named consul for life, was empowered to legislate and to interpret and define the constitution through edicts issued through the Senate senatus consulta. The Legislative Body would henceforth be convoked and dissolved at the will of the government.
The difficult task of bringing luster to the captive legislature was handled with aplomb by Louis de Fontanes, [35] who during his remarkable career rode the changing. Following a year of exile in England, Fontanes returned to France, where in he became president of the Legislative Body. While he quietly insisted on the autonomy and dignity of this assembly, his official speeches were such masterpieces of obsequiousness that a satirical pamphlet published under the Restoration ridiculed him by simply quoting from his Napoleonic addresses.
If the universe was not silent before the emperor, the Legislative Body generally was. As soon as the wise saw him. Even as the Legislative Body was wholly subordinate to him, Napoleon was concerned to clothe this living symbol of his supremacy as lawgiver in appropriate dignity. Bernard Poyet designed a majestic flight of steps and an imperial portico for the Seine facade of the Palais-Bourbon Fig. Although the cold glamour of Ingres's Napoleon on His Imperial Throne has proved irresistible to late twentieth-century eyes familiar with Pop Art and Photo-Realism, the artist was deeply pained to learn that this strangely hieratic and airless portrait Fig.
Modern commentators, noting among the sources for the portrait the God the. Father panel from Jan van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece, plundered for display in Paris, have delighted in Ingres's forceful archaism, in which compositional rigidity is startlingly combined with minute detail. The stylistic archaism reinforces references to Charlemagne—the sword and hand of justice supposedly borne by the medieval emperor and restored, or perhaps manufactured anew, for Napoleon's coronation. Although Ingres's imperial portrait, purchased by the Legislative Body prior to the Salon, was apparently not an official commission, it was an appropriate one.
It offers an unblushing expression of the emperor's domination over the Legislative Body. That Ingres's portrait was sent to this undistinguished location is not surprising given the critics' response to it. Before the Salon, however, this portrait would have seemed a fitting ornament for the chambers of Fontanes. Ingres's presentation of the emperor as a new Charlemagne, timelessly enthroned with the props Fontanes had recommended for the imperial coronation, [47] struck a common chord with the pious nostalgia for the Middle Ages professed by the president of the Legislative Body.
Shortly after the imperial coronation, Fontanes joyfully observed:. Ten centuries have passed since the epoch when France saw a similar spectacle. A monarchy of fourteen hundred years that seemed buried beneath so many ruins has suddenly reappeared with its ancient splendors, and almost all the diadems that the family of the Martels [i. This singular event, explained Fontanes, had been made possible by the restoration of Catholicism in France: The construction by Chaudet, Moitte, and Ingres of a Napoleon whose legislative authority was both timeless and superhuman was consonant with the emperor's decision to convoke the Grand Sanhedrin—the ancient Jewish govern-.
This meeting, February 9-March 13, , was a legal pageant intended to guarantee that the religious and cultural traditions of Napoleon's Jewish subjects would not interfere with their civic duty. The compatibility between Jewish custom and French law had been discussed by the Assembly of Jewish Notables, convoked by Napoleon on March 7, This assembly argued that only the Grand Sanhedrin could rule on matters of Jewish polity. Its deliberations, the emperor wrote, would have "the force of ecclesiastical and religious law" and would "stand as a second legislation of the Jews.
David Sintzheim, chief rabbi of Strasbourg, presided over the proceedings. This fanciful headdress, reminiscent of the ancient Levitical miter and the horns of Moses, was not part of contemporary rabbinical regalia. It was apparently designed to reinforce the spirit of pseudo-religious solemnity in which the Sanhedrin's deliberations were clothed. The law, Sintzheim declared in his closing discourse,. The official line that the meeting of the Grand Sanhedrin was an act of imperial clemency was as fictive as the notion that the Code Napoleon was born of Bonaparte's legislative genius.
Another Napoleonic project, the Imperial Catechism published in , [56] ostensibly introduced uniformity into Catholic worship; actually, it taught obedience to the state in the guise of religious instruction. The work was largely copied from the Catechism of the Diocese of Meaux , by the great seventeenth-century.
Napoleon, however, insisted on drafting one section of the text, whose importance was indicated by an asterisk. The lesson on the Fourth Commandment, "Honor thy father and mother," thus explained that love, respect, and obedience were due Napoleon "because God, who creates empires and distributes them according to his will, in lavishing gifts on our emperor. To honor and serve our emperor is thus to honor and serve God Himself. Such politicizing of the catechism went far beyond Bossuet's interpretation of this commandment as prohibiting disobedience toward pastors, kings, and magistrates.
Beyond the element of personal aggrandizement for which Napoleon had an insatiable appetite , references to divine legislation in imperial propaganda suggest that the emperor subscribed to the notion—articulated in Rousseau's chapter on the legislator in The Social Contract —that laws, to be durable, needed a divine pedigree.
This attachment to the divine basis of law also reflects Napoleon's conviction that religion was integral to the social order, a conviction affirmed in the Concordat, the treaty with Pope Pius VII signed in and proclaimed the following year, which recognized Catholicism as the religion of the majority of the French people in return for the Vatican's official recognition of the French republic. Between the winter of and the summer of , Chateaubriand tearfully rediscovered Christianity under the influence of his mother's death and the opinions of Fontanes.
This change of heart was aesthetic as well as religious: Chateaubriand realized the unparalleled fecundity of Christianity, which had inspired magnificent literature, virtuous institutions, and the tender—and distinctly modern—emotion of melancholy. In the Bible, Chateaubriand found poetry unsurpassed in primitive vigor and moral purity—decisively superior to Homer. Although the narratives of the Old Testament were a fundamental part of Christian tradition, Chateaubriand's focus on the literary merits of Hebrew Scripture had an exotic appeal in France at the turn of the nineteenth century, when most readers' knowledge of Moses and the Hebrews was limited to the.
To reestablish Christian monarchic society on the ruins of the Old Regime and the Revolution, Chateaubriand located its foundation in the primeval authority of Moses, the prophets, and the patriarchs. This political orientation also informs his praise of Mosaic law. Chateaubriand offered poets the subject of Moses descending from Mount Sinai, his brow "adorned with two rays of fire, his face resplendent with the glories of the Lord.
On returning from exile, Bonald socialized with Chateaubriand, Fontanes, and Joubert in the reactionary Consulate salons of Napoleon's brother Lucien and sister Elisa Bacciocchi and of Chateaubriand's lover, Pauline de Beaumont. Bonald argued that the proposed Civil Code, while necessary, must be understood as secondary to the natural, moral, and divine law that had served as the.
Bonald identified this fundamental law with the Ten Commandments, which can be found "on the first page of every civil and criminal code of Christian peoples, just as it forms the first instruction of all men. He maintained that the law revealed to Moses—"this primitive and general law, this natural, perfect, divine law"—was the only true constitution. Before it, the laws of the Revolution crumbled like those of ancient societies ignorant of the teachings of Moses and Christ and deceived by their leaders into believing that their false and absurd laws were inspired by the gods.
But "a reasonable people wants to see, shining on the brow of the legislator who descends from the holy mountain with the tablets of the law, the mysterious authority that guarantees his communion with divinity. Although Bonald posed as a new Bossuet, denouncing the heresies of modern France, his preoccupation with fundamental principles of law reveals his debt to revolutionary thought.
The legislators of the Revolution had foolishly erred, he argued, in not using the Ten Commandments themselves as their principle of law. Napoleon shared Bonald's conviction that society takes precedence over the individual and that France needed, above all, obedience and uniformity. But for Napoleon religion was only a means to secure his authority.
Bonald, Chateaubriand, and Fontanes would have to wait until the Bourbon Restoration for the fulfillment of the counter-revolutionary aspirations nursed under the Consulate and Empire. Less than a decade after the divinity of Napoleonic authority was inscribed in the Imperial Catechism , the empire was crushed by its monarchic enemies. A French caricature from the spring of shows Napoleon marching into exile with a bundle of imperial ordinances hanging from a broken scepter and a copy of the great code under his arm Fig.
When Napoleon returned from exile one year later for the final brief adventure that ended at Waterloo, he was bereft of the authority represented by Chaudet and Ingres in the effigies purchased by the Legislative Body. The restored emperor convinced his liberal opponent Benjamin Constant to draft an amendment to the imperial constitutions to introduce a measure of liberty he was no longer in a.
The Additional Act of April 22, , called the Benjamine after its author, modified the balance of governmental power at the expense of the executive. As in the constitutional charter recently granted by the restored Louis XVIII, legislative power was to be shared with a bicameral legislature of peers and deputies.
The preamble states that Napoleon had postponed establishing liberal institutions solely to maximize the extent and stability of a great European federation: Although this hasty constitutional reform was no more durable than the regime of One Hundred Days, the myth of Napoleon's legislative genius survived. In a painting exhibited in the Salon of by Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse , Napoleon sits on a cloud far above the somber island of Saint Helena, to which he was exiled after Waterloo Fig. A conflation of Zeus and Saint John the Evangelist in his crisply detailed uniform, he inscribes his code on a tablet while a reverent figure of Time crowns him.
Although the return to the old monarchic colors symbolized the identification with the Old Regime in France between and , the Bourbon Restoration could hardly erase the previous quarter-century of French history. Imperial artists and politicians shifted their allegiance to the Bourbon monarchy, but the new regime maintained such Napoleonic institutions as the Council of State and the Legion of Honor. And by imitating the Napoleonic cult of the legislator the Restoration attempted to reinstate the Old Regime association of the law with monarchic will.
The preamble to the Bourbon Charter of exemplifies the Restorations explicit denial and implicit co-option of the modern French political tradition. Here the revolutionary discourse of reason, universality, natural rights, and the general will is silenced. In place of a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen there is a reference to divine Providence, which, "recalling us [i. For "we have effaced from our memory, as we would wish that one. The original draft of the preamble was provided by none other than Louis de Fontanes, who repudiated the revolutionary heritage with the same rhetorical flair he had shown so often in flattering Napoleon.
His text deserves to be read in the original French:. A power greater than peoples and monarchs made society and molded the different governments of the earth. It is our duty to manage them rather than to explain their principles. The older their foundations, the more we reverence them. Whoever tries too hard to understand them errs; whoever tampers with them imprudently can bring all to ruin. Whoever is wise respects them and bows before that majestic obscurity that must cloak both society and religion in mystery. Ballanche held that "the same divine power that reserves the right to establish and consolidate social institutions wanted to place their sacred constitution behind a veil that the hand of innovators cannot raise with impunity.
The preamble to the charter—both in Fontanes's original draft and in Count Jean-Claude Beugnot's less pungent final version—testifies to the passage into mainstream French politics of the counter-revolutionary apology for throne. A commemorative medal by Jean-Louis-Nicolas Jaley represented the official interpretation of this reform as an act of royal volition Fig.
Brenet's medal commemorating the Grand Sanhedrin see Fig. The political history of the Bourbon Restoration was shaped by an uneasy compromise between the acceptance of constitutional reform and the assertion. Committed to the exercise of royal authority in accord with the constitutional charter, the regime stubbornly aspired to pre-revolutionary absolutism, an aspiration especially apparent after the coronation in of Louis's ultra-royalist brother, Charles X.
To dignify this uncomfortable position, an iconography of divine legislation was employed in a cycle of paintings commissioned by the government to decorate four rooms in the Louvre that were remodeled in as new chambers for the Council of State. The Council of State played an integral part in the conflict between constitutional legality and royal prerogative that colored politics under the Restoration. Deriving from the corps of professional administrators who counseled Old Regime monarchs and bearing the name of one of the principal cogs in Bonaparte's political machine, the Council of State was linked to both monarchic absolutism and Napoleonic authoritarianism.
The liberal opposition particularly disliked it, objecting to its extra-legal character. When the Council of State was reorganized by an ordinance of August 26, , it moved to the royal palace of the Louvre. The oath of new members of the Council of State was revised to include loyalty to the charter as well as the king, and the government was no longer to have the power, called destitution , to remove unwanted council members. A final exercise of this power, however, gave an ultra-royalist cast to the new Council of State.
Together with the description of the ensemble in the Salon livret of , these remains give an idea of the decorative program. Although visitors to the Salon of could view the new Council of State rooms, the decorations were intended for an elite audience. On the ceiling of the principal assembly hall is M. The event transpires with a graciousness absent from Jaley's commemorative medal, which apparently served as Blondel's model see Fig. The monarchs and legists of the Old Regime looking on approve. To suggest the confidence inspired by the law, a putto sleeps on an open book inscribed CODE.
A hostile critic remarked in the Journal du Commerce that "young France has armed itself against the arbitrariness of the ordinances and decisions of the Council of State, not by sleeping on the codes, but by studying them with perseverance. In associating the charter with divine will and traditional Bourbon largess, Blondel's ceiling painting echoes the sentiments of the charter's preamble. This didactic program continues in the coving, where monarchic precedents for the charter are illustrated in illusionistic bronze reliefs. Here Christian virtues enact an unfamiliar constitutional pantomime.
The Mosaic posturing of the putto Spirit of the Laws—like the obtrusively tangible anchor of Hope—points to that uncomfortable mixture of the literal and the ideal characteristic of late Davidian history painting. The royal throne in the room with Blondel's ceiling paintings symbolically referred to the king's presiding, by proxy, over the Council of State.
On the ceiling of the fourth room Jean-Baptiste Mauzaisse rephrased in Bourbon terms the Napoleonic theme of divine legislative inspiration. The persuasive power of the allegory, however, is blunted by a discursive specificity of historical and contemporary reference that lends an air of masquerade to Mauzaisse's legislators. Legendary legislators as prototypes of the French monarch were repeatedly invoked in the Council of State rooms. Beneath Blondel's octagonal ceiling painting in the assembly hall hung his portraits of the divinely inspired legislators Lycurgus, Solon, Numa, and Moses—the last seated in stiff majesty like a salvador mundi Fig.
Delacroix's large canvas 3. The emphatic gestures, bold chiaroscuro, and warm tonality of the sketch suggest that Delacroix brought to this motif an operatic amplitude and a material opulence that recall the contemporary Death of Sardanapalus. Justinian's extravagantly stylized pose suggests at once the flux of inspiration and the aloof authority of the lawgiver. Contemporary accounts of the lost painting speak of jewel-encrusted draperies that must have made the Justinian seem all the more remote and exotic.
Delacroix's representation of the attributes of divine inspiration seems deliberate, for Justinian himself was principally a compiler and codifier of earlier Roman law. But the emphasis on the divine origins of law was also in keeping with the decorative cycle for which the work was painted. Illustrations of heroic Old Regime magistrates refer obliquely to the violence of recent French history. Among these was the most admired work of the cycle, Paul Delaroche's pathos-ridden Death of President Duranti destroyed in the Palais d'Orsay fire, In invoking divinely inspired legislators and glorifying the Bourbon monarchy, the decorative program of the Council of State rooms embodied the aspiration of the regime to bolster the authority of the monarch.
Given the resurgence of piety under the Restoration, it is not surprising that Moses, who occupies a place of honor in Mauzaisse's ceiling painting for the Council of State, was an attractive legislative motif after The roundheaded tablets of the law were reconverted to Catholicism and stripped of association with the rights of man in the hushed interior of the Expiatory Chapel , which Chateaubriand thought "perhaps the most remarkable" building in Paris.
The Latin inscription beneath speaks of Christian duty: In using Mosaic imagery to aggrandize Bonald's battle against the hubristic fallacies of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, Lamartine was following Chateaubriand, who described Bonald's idol Bossuet, the seventeenth-century theologian and historian, in similar terms. Lamartine who, like Hugo, eventually cast off his youthful ultra-royalism later distanced himself from his poem, asserting that when he wrote it he had not read Bonald but considered him "the honest and eloquent apostle of a sublime and hazy theocracy that would serve as the poetry of our political affairs if God deigned to name his earthly viceroys and ministers.
Victor Hugo used similarly political references to Moses in one of his most reactionary odes, "Le Sacre de Charles X" , written in honor of the splendid neo-medieval coronation of Louis XVIII's retrograde brother. The poem concludes with a prayer that God—whom the monarch has seen face-to-face, as if on Sinai—impart to the royal brow "two rays from your head.
In light of the association of Moses with royalism and counter-revolution in the Council of State rooms and in the poetry of Lamartine and Hugo, it is surprising that liberals also appealed to the authority of the biblical legislator during the Bourbon Restoration. Benedetti, in the role of Moses, appeared in a simple and sublime costume copied from the statue by Michelangelo in San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome; he had not addressed twenty words to the Eternal One before my received wisdom vanished; I no longer saw a charlatan changing his cane into a serpent.
Rossini's hero, clad in imitation of Michelangelo's revered figure which will concern us later , revealed to Stendhal that Moses was an enemy of royal tyranny. Joseph Salvador publicly claimed Moses for the liberal cause in a controversial book of The liberal paper Le Globe responded enthusiastically:. There is a people more antique than Greek and Roman antiquity, whose rule of law, equality, liberty, utility, nationality, and intellectual superiority were highly acclaimed and recognized in the despotic Orient before the development of occidental civilization: The man who deserves to be considered the true founder of free and legal government.
Published only four years after sacrilege had been officially defined as a capital crime a measure Bonald endorsed , the book produced an explosive reaction in the right-wing press. Salvador's politically charged view of Moses had a comic counterpart in a pair of anti-royalist Decalogue prints c. A "Ministerial Decalogue," in contrast, prescribes fraud, corruption, and hypocrisy under the sign of the backward-walking crayfish, stock symbol of retrograde ultra-royalism Fig.
In July the ministers of Charles X issued four ordinances intended to stifle freedom of the press and break legislative opposition to the crown. This unpopular action inflamed the liberal opposition that had gained an unlikely ally in Chateaubriand, who, soured by his loss of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in and reborn as an outspoken opponent of press censorship, was scandalized by the ordinances, which presumed, in an Old Regime spirit comme au temps du bon plaisir , that the king's authority superseded the law.
Popular indignation over the four ordinances fueled a successful uprising that demonstrated the tenacious vitality of the principle inaugurated with the Constitution of that "in France no authority is superior to the law. No longer would the king have blanket authority, granted by article 14 of the Bourbon charter, to make "the regulations and ordinances necessary for the. Duke Louis-Philippe d'Orleans, lieutenant general of France and head of the younger branch of the French royal family, was elevated to the throne to protect the constitutional principles Charles X's ministers had disregarded.
The new monarch's relationship to the Bourbon dynasty was complicated because his. Louis-Philippe's distant blood kinship with his deposed predecessor did not guarantee his mandate to rule. Legal probity, symbolized by the inaugural oath of allegiance to the new constitutional Charter of , invested the new king with authority; he acknowledged as much by insisting on legal rectitude in the daily business of government.
An unofficial bronze commemorative medal by Joseph-Arnold Pingret expressed the idea that the revolution of had reestablished the law Figs. The anti-clericalism of the inscription on the reverse reflects a decade and a half of oppressive Bourbon piety: Pingret's representation of the law as roundheaded tablets recalls any number of revolutionary images of the constitution and of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; the revival of this revolutionary iconographic tradition under the July Monarchy was appropriate to the regime's professed veneration of the law.
Nonetheless, the perception of the law was different from what it had been during the Revolution of Under Louis-Philippe, the law was not a miraculous source of national regeneration but a shield defending order and property. Thus Guizot said that Louis-Philippe considered the law "the best shield for the throne as well as for the citizenry. This conception of the law developed from the dangers faced by the regime.
It became apparent at the outset of Louis-Philippe's reign that the regime represented the interests of the prosperous middle class and sympathized with neither the egalitarian sentiment nor the bellicose nationalism of those who had brought down the Bourbon Restoration. The July Monarchy was menaced in its early. France Defends the Charter Fig. The Hall of was part of the historical museum Louis-Philippe created in the Palace of Versailles to glorify the history of France and to legitimize his own regime. The brash literal character.
The July Monarchy's cult of the law was expressed most elaborately in the decoration of the Palais-Bourbon. In Jean-Baptiste-Jules de Joly , who succeeded Bernard Poyet as the architect responsible for the legislative palace, directed the alteration and enlargement of the building.
At the opening of the annual legislative session, Louis-Philippe would go to the Palais-Bourbon to deliver the "Speech from the Throne" to the legislature. A contemporary print shows him mounting the palace steps at the head of a vast retinue Fig. As he entered the palace via the new Salle Louis-Philippe Fig. In Protecting Law , facing the entrance to the Salle Louis-Philippe, the tablets of the law are set in a panoply that features the caduceus of commerce and a hand of justice.
To the left, a rustic family sleeps amid the tools and fruit of its labor under the protection of an armed woman. To the right, a book is inscribed by an infant-bearing mother to show the emanation of the law from the will of its beneficiaries cf. Avenging Law , above the entrance, shows the nurturing of civilization under the fierce guardianship of the law. A philosopher resembling Socrates, protected by two winged figures, reclines beside attributes of industry, the arts, and science. Whereas Protecting Law has a uniform relief and smooth ground, Avenging Law has a more irregular pattern and a rough ground that subtly dramatizes the theme of crime and punishment.
The firm and meticulous contour of the study for Protecting Law contrasts with the nervous vitality of that for Avenging Law ; this contrast echoes the thematic counterpoint of the two lunettes more emphatically than do differences in ground texture and relief pattern in the finished marbles. Otherwise, the relief sculptures remained faithful to the drawings where, in the language of official allegory, homage is rendered to the entities the July Monarchy held scared: In these works, the revolutionary association of the law with regeneration and natural rights has been replaced by reference to material prosperity, punishment, and protection.
The pious glorification of the law in Triqueti's Protecting Law resembles that of "Les Laboureurs," a section of Lamartine's book-length poem Jocelyn , written in the fall of Describing a scene of agricultural labor and rest, the poet sees a reflection of divine law in the earthly law of labor and the bond of familial love:.
A member of the Chamber of Deputies since , Lamartine had ample opportunity to view Triqueti's reliefs in the Salle Louis-Philippe. It is society itself. After entering the palace through the Salle Louis-Philippe, the king would receive deputations from the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers in the new Salon du Roi—a square room with a throne set into a niche facing the entrance from the Salle Louis-Philippe Fig. Delacroix's decoration of this room with allegories of justice, war, commerce, agriculture,.
The mural decoration above the throne niche—the first part visible, according to the artist, to someone entering the room—is devoted to the theme of justice. Delacroix has indicated justice as the foremost of royal virtues. But only the "inviolable and sacred" king—who held all executive power art. Concealed within the bourgeois hat and umbrella of the Citizen King, one of the regime's wittiest critics suggested, were the crown and scepter of absolute monarchy.
And it was appropriate for the critic Gustave Planche to compare the bulky legislator, seated in the frieze above the throne, to the Sistine prophets. Across the Seine from the Palais-Bourbon, the theme of divine legislation was treated in the colossal bronze doors that Triqueti, assisted by Etienne-Hippolyte Maindron , sculpted for the Church of the Madeleine Fig. Commissioned by the government in and emplaced in , the doors illustrate the Ten Commandments through biblical narrative.
Originally the subject of the doors was to have been the life of the patron saint of the church, Mary Magdalen; the modification of the program reflects the political agenda of Louis-Philippe's constitutional monarchy. In dedicating the church.
Despite the commitment of the July Monarchy to ecclesiastical patronage, this expiatory reference to the Revolution had no place in its official art. On the contrary, the new regime aligned itself with popular sentiment as it focused on the nation's revolutionary and imperial past. Thus it publicized Louis-Philippe's military service during the Revolution and ceremonially returned the ashes of Napoleon to France in Although there is little documentary evidence for the choice of subject for the Madeleine doors, [32] Adolphe Thiers, the minister in charge of the commission, shared a taste for Old Testament subjects with the Protestant Triqueti, [33] and the sculptor had employed the motif of the Mosaic tablets in his work in progress for the Salle Louis-Philippe, also commissioned by Thiers's ministry.
This theme was especially suitable for a regime that looked to the law for its principal support. The reliefs of the Madeleine doors are predominantly devoted to crime and punishment. The most solemn narratives employ a vehement emotional rhetoric absent from Triqueti's principal point of reference, the Gates of Paradise of Ghiberti—a work Thiers especially admired. Here are stern demonstrations of the "law of fear and terror," as Jewish legislation was characterized in a popular religious digest.
To the right, a bound criminal is hounded by accusers and dragged away for punishment. A similar severity characterizes the bottom panel on the left door, representing the crime of adultery Fig. David, seated beside Bathsheba, is overcome with remorse as the stern prophet Nathan confronts him. Nathan reveals David's crime through the parable of a rich man who steals a poor man's only lamb, narrated in a subsidiary zone. As a sign of divine wrath, David's illegitimate son lies lifeless before his guilty parents.