Yale French Studies

Yale University Press

Contents

DAN EDELSTEIN AND BETTINA R. LERNER Editors' Preface: Mythomanies.............................................................1I: Reading RevolutionMARIE-HLNE HUET The Face of Disaster........................................................................................7DAN EDELSTEIN The Modernization of Myth: From Balzac to Sorel.................................................................32JEAN-MARIE APOSTOLIDS Herg and the Myth of the Superchild...................................................................45II: From Nation to RepublicBETTINA R. LERNER Michelet, Mythologue........................................................................................61LEON SACHS Finding l'Ecole rpublicaine in the Damnedest of Places: Franois Bgaudeau's Entre les murs.......................73TYLER STOVALL The Myth of the Liberatory Republic and the Political Culture of Freedom in Imperial France.....................89III: Myths of SelfGRAN BLIX Heroic Genesis in the Mmorial de Sainte-Hlne....................................................................107EDWARD BERENSON Fashoda, Dreyfus, and the Myth of Jean-Baptiste Marchand......................................................129NATACHA ALLET Myth and Legend in Antonin Artaud's Theater.....................................................................143LAWRENCE D. KRITZMAN A Certain Idea of de Gaulle..............................................................................157

Chapter One

MARIE-HLNE HUET

The Face of Disaster

It is said that when Danton mounted the scaffold in the Spring of 1793, he told his executioner: "Executioner, show my head to the people, it's well worth a look!" Danton's formidable face was widely recognized for its rugged features and blunt determination (he had once declared, "Nature gave me the stern face of Liberty"). This explained his last, defiant words, as did the executioner's well-known practice of grasping the decapitated heads of the guillotine's most famous victims by the hair and holding them up before the crowd gathered to witness the executions. The executioner's victorious gesture did not always produce its desired effect: in the case of Louis XVI, the people had been kept too far away from the scaffold to see anything. After Charlotte Corday's beheading, when the executioner's assistant held up her head and slapped her face, the crowd responded with indignation. But the gesture did signal a special kind of victory over certain enemies: whether conspirators or aristocrats, they were all traitors to the Revolution. It was a gesture reserved for the most famous names, an ultimate distinction that restored to the victims a privilege they had once enjoyed. The guillotine was known as the great "equalizer," but the executioner's gesture reestablished the hierarchy that death had stolen from its victims. Danton, the plebeian who had so dominated the politics of the young Republic, commanded on the scaffold a distinction that had first been accorded to a King.

As scholars and historians have often noted, engravings of the Revolution's executioner displaying his victims' decapitated heads to the people recall the mythic image of Perseus holding the head of Medusa But in images from the Terror, the focus has shifted from the triumphant hero to the defeated monster. The executioner was often left out of the engravings, which showed a quasi-disembodied hand-the victor, after all, was not a single individual but the people-clutching the heads of the various monsters that had attacked or betrayed the Nation (from Louis XVI to Robespierre). [Figures 1,2] For the Revolutionaries, it seems, Medusa never died, could not be slain. Perseus's triumph had to be endlessly repeated to ensure victory.

For Jean Clair, the reappearance of the myth of Medusa during the Revolution is symptomatic: "Medusa reappears every time the normal order of things is upset and chaos threatens.... Her iconography during the upheaval of the Revolution is particularly significant, and more significant still is her connection, from that point on, with the unique machine that would become known as ... the guillotine. Medusa had undoubtedly been associated, from her beginnings, with the theme of decapitation. A beheaded monster herself, she presides over the bloody sacrifice of humans' decapitation, which they rightly call 'capital punishment.'" Clair describes the form of the guillotine as "the perfect arrangement of a rectangle, a trapezoid, and a circle.... In all cosmogonies and traditions, the circle is the perfect, primordial form within which the various hierarchies of creation were written and inflected. But the guillotine reverses the traditional pattern, inscribing the circle within a square that itself is cut off by a trapezoid inscribed within a second rectangle. The guillotine is not only the instrument of a detheologisation of the universe: it is the instrument of a negative cosmology." [Figure 3]

By a strange coincidence-one that would profoundly influence the career of Thodore Gricault-the early nineteenth century's most famous shipwreck was that of the Medusa, a frigate on her way to Senegal carrying 395 passengers, weapons, money, and a bust of King Louis XVIII. In 1818, when Gricault began his monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa, he prepared for the work by collecting body parts from near by hospitals and making several studies of severed heads. One of these now hangs in the Stockholm national museum as Ttes de supplicis: decapitated heads of executed criminals, lying on a sheet-a post-Revolutionary link between the guillotine and the frigate Medusa [Figure 4]. But Gricault's tude shows no sign of the executioner's hand. The severed heads are anonymous, no longer representing a national victory against a mythical enemy. Perseus and the Gorgon have both vanished, leaving decapitation as fragmentation without triumph, death without agency. Still, the memory lingers; though hidden, the myth remains, even if disguised. It is as if an invisible Gorgon had triumphed in the end, claiming for herself the sword of Perseus.

Many episodes conspired to weave multiple symbolic threads between the Revolution and its legacy, threads that were as deadly and as terrifying as Medusa's gaze. The story of the disaster that struck the ship Medusa, of the men who survived to tell it, and of Gricault's painting of it (now slowly disintegrating in the Louvre Museum) is one such episode.

THE NARRATIVE

The ill-fated voyage of the Medusa is well-known, and has been recounted with striking regularity by historians, critics, and novelists. I will briefly review the facts. In June 1816, four ships left France bound for Senegal, on a mission to reinstate authority over territorial outposts first established by the French, briefly occupied by British troops, then returned to their first colonizers as part of the 1815 treaty that, among other things, restored the monarchy in France. The ship's passengers strongly reflected post-Revolutionary society, with its conflicting political loyalties and ever-widening social divisions. Among the passengers were eight cartographers, described as "explorers," who had been sent out to map the Cape Verde peninsula. There were also some 160 soldiers on board, many of whom had dubious pasts. The soldiers chose their own officers, and formed a...