Stevenson, Glynnis Napier;
(2025)
The Bleus and the Blancs: Revolutionary Commemoration and Political Coalition Building at the 1889 Decennial Exhibition of Fine Art.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
This dissertation explores the revolutionary-themed paintings on display at the centennial of the French Revolution against the backdrop of the tense political election of 1889. Its prominent themes include revolutionary commemoration, cultural memory, political “othering”, populism vs. centrism, and the political use and abuse of history. The 1889 Exposition universelle, held nominally to celebrate the anniversary of the French Revolution, is today best known for the construction of the Eiffel Tower, and for its projection of French colonial power. Less well known are the paintings that formed an essential part of its political agenda. The event, a spectacle heralding France’s technological, artistic, and imperial prowess, was criticized by those on the left for insufficiently celebrating the legacy of the French Revolution. The relative absence of revolutionary symbolism in the fairground speaks to organizers’ concerns that an overemphasis on the Revolution could polarize the electorate. Various stripes of clerical royalism, militant ethno-nationalist Bonapartism, centrism, and socialist leftism complicated the French political landscape of the fin-de-siècle. The charismatic, militant, populist General Boulanger had the support of an unwieldy spectrum of voters ranging from royalists fatigued from successive political losses to disaffected working-class voters. In response, the Opportunist Republicans in power created a politically neutral centennial celebration less to stifle the left than to avoid enraging their royalist-Boulangist opposition any further. Revolutionary commemoration and counter-commemoration in 1889 provide useful case studies for understanding the fraught contemporary charge of political difference. This project sheds light on the Naturalist paintings created between 1878-1888 representing various aspects of the Revolution of 1789. These paintings have not been analyzed for their multi-layered rewriting of history. There were fewer than two dozen pictures representing the French Revolution in the Decennial Exhibition on the 1889 fairgrounds, but they provide an important vantage point from which to understand purposeful forgetting, compromise, and the centrist taming of history.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The Bleus and the Blancs: Revolutionary Commemoration and Political Coalition Building at the 1889 Decennial Exhibition of Fine Art |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History of Art |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206124 |
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