An encounter with David's "Bara"

An interesting perspective on David's Death of Bara was provided by the exhibition of the painting  held in  Avignon in 1989 as part of the bicentenary commemorations. Jean-Clément Martin described his reactions in an essay of 1990, updated for his 2012 book La machine à fantasmes.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bara_David.jpg

EXHIBITION:  La mort de Bara.  De l'évenement au mythe.  Autour du tableau de Jacques-Louis David.  At Avignon, 18th January to 15 March 1989.  

J.-C.M. remarks that he remembered illustrations of Bara from his earliest schoolbooks and was confident and well-informed about the historical figure.  The exhibition was held not in the Musée Calvet, where David's picture is normally display,  but in the former Jesuit chapel in the rue de la République, now a Lapidary Museum.  Despite the busy main street outside, the church, with its Baroque facade, was an effective venue; the atmosphere of a silent grandeur encouraged a mood of contemplation and reflection. (The effect was only slightly marred by the prominence of an expanse of red netting under the roof.)

David's painting took central stage, enthroned in the middle of the chapel, on what was once the site of the altar.  Although he was very familiar with the image, Jean-Clément found himself taken by surprise:

Joseph Bara [cont.]

 

Early representations of Bara

The Spring of 1794 saw a veritable outpouring of prints and engravings on the subject of  Bara.  Among the prints from Year II are a number of ambitious narrative scenes, which recreated the specific circumstances of his death in as much detail as possible.  Of necessity, they rely on the testimony of Desmarres: the feisty soldier-boy  is depicted standing; he resists the bayonets of the rebel band which surrounds him. As well as his youth and virtue, the accompanying captions emphasise his martial qualities.  They usually repeat the dying words furnished by Robespierre,  although Desmarres's more robust version can sometimes be found.  Homage is also invariably paid to his support of his mother, a conventional virtuous act by the good Republican soldier. No-one seemed quite sure how old Bara really was - some versions (as the one below) have him as young as eleven.

"Death of the Young Barat" - anonymous print of 1794.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8412073v

"This young Republican was surprised by Rebels. When called upon to cry "Long live the King", he replied only  "Long live the Republic!" and was stabbed multiple times by the brigands. This child of eleven, provided for his mother from his wages, and subsisted himself only on bread.

The Assembly, when it heard this reported, accorded him the honours of the Pantheon." 

Drawn and engraved by Philibert-Louis Debucourt, Paris, year II.

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8412072f

"Dedicated to Young Frenchmen

The entire army witnessed with astonishment Joseph Barra, equipped as a hussar, scarcely thirteen years of age, confront danger everyday, at the head of the cavalry; it once saw this young hero throw to the ground and take prisoner two brigands who had dared to attack him.  This generous child, surrounded by rebels, preferred to perish rather than surrender, and relinquish the two horses that he was leading. 

During the entire time that he had served in the armies of the Republic, he spent money only on absolute necessities, and sent to his large and indigent family all that he could save."  

Joseph Bara - Republican hero

 

Aquatint by Angélique Briceau, c.1794  
British Museum collections

The heroic death of the soldier-boy Joseph Bara has long been a familiar part of French Revolutionary tradition.  His story was particularly promoted during the Third Republic, when his image featured in the salles d'honneurs of regiments,  and he was the subject of numerous official statues, poems, plays and paintings.   Jean-Joseph Weerts's huge canvas, La Mort de Bara,  commissioned by the state in 1880, adorned a salon in the Élysée Palace during the Universal Exposition of 1889.  In schoolbooks "Bara's drum" was part of Republican collective memory for many decades, right down to the 1960s and '70s.  

Even today, Bara is still celebrated, at least in his native town of Palaiseau where in 1979 his name was given to the local school. As recently as September 2008, the Souvenir Chouan de Bretagne was moved to send a letter of protest to Palaiseau on the occasion of an exhibition of comic-book images: [Il était une fois Joseph Bara en BD]

The life and death of Joseph Bara

The legend of Bara is untrammelled by much in the way of biographical details.  The archives record only two events from his short life. The first is his birth, in Palaiseau on 30th July 1779,  the third son of François Bara, a gamekeeper on the local estate, and his wife Marie Anne Leroy (Bara was the ninth of their ten children; his younger brother is described as an invalid). The boy is recorded as having been born at the château. The second is his death, recounted in a letter to the National Convention dated 8th December 1793, from General Demarres, his commanding officer in the Vendée.  Between these two dates almost nothing is know. 

The skull of Stofflet

... An unpleasant relic from the War in the Vendée

When I came across this macabre image by chance, I was rather shocked to learn that the skull on display is that of the much-respected Vendean general Jean-Nicolas Stofflet. This  is not some downmarket Ripley's; it is the flagship Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Cholet.  With all the dialogue around history and memory in the Vendée, it seems strange to find so disrespectful an exhibit.  (I suspect part of the explanation is that the skull is on loan to the museum - the family who owns it are said to take an active interest in its display and study.)

Unsurprisingly, there have been protests. In 2015, during a visit by the organisation Souvenir Vendéen  to  Barthélémont, in Lorraine, the birthplace of Stofflet, the mayor Serge Husson, who is  himself a distant descendant of the general, declared his desire to see an end to this "indecent situation".  He wanted to see the skull buried or deposited,  either in Barthélémont  itself or in the memorial chapel near Maulévrier.  

David d'Angers's veterans

 

During his stay in Saint-Florent for the inauguration of the monument to Bonchamps in 1825, David d'Angers made a series of sketches of veterans of the Grande-Armée d'Anjou who had gathered for the occasion. His original album of 1825, Portraits de Vendéens par David d'Angers, is preserved in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Angers. The Archives de la Vendée website tells us he planned to create a series of bas-relief, but, if so, the project was never begun.  Each of the 62 drawings is carefully annotated with biographical details, either by  David himself, or in a second hand, probably that of his former drawing master Jean-Jacques Delusse (1758-1833). The result is a rare visual record of a passing generation. 

On view in the church at Saint-Florent

David, it seems, had no political agenda. He was moved by the emotion of the occasion and by his empathy for these tough proud old men.  His interest in the fashionable science of physiognomy underlay his desire to record their features.  According to Victor Pavie, the men responded readily, crowding to his door, eager to share their reminiscences. Years later, Pavie tried to explain how David, a man of convinced Republican views, had come to feel drawn to the veterans:

The Vendean peasants who gathered around the tomb in Saint-Florent in 1825 constituted a people.  David understood this.  As a child from a different school, almost a soldier from another camp,  he could not embrace the Vendée in all its radiant unity - the sanctity of the cause, the martyred devotion.  But he recognised generous and worthy opponents of  Kléber and Marceau. The era of the War in the Vendée was coloured for him with the same Homeric prestige that Gros's brush had lent to the battles of the Empire, but with the resonance of religion and home.  He preferred to call his native province by the name "Vendée". Two days at Saint-Florent, under a sun which lit up the wide vistas and splendid serenity of his homeland, sufficed to bring him in intimate contact with the survivors of the Grand Army.  These brave men posed and chatted to him with a frankness which was both noble and familiar.  Not one aspect  escaped him.  To see him so keen to record with the same crayon, their stories and their features,  they would easily have mistaken him for a partisan - he was indeed an unreserved  admirer of their pride in combat and simplicity in glory.

Oration of M. Victor Pavie, for the inauguration of the bust of David, Angers, 12th March 1863

Revue de l'Anjou - Google Books

The monument to Bonchamps at Saint-Florent

 

My father was one of the five thousand prisonners in the church at Saint-Florent, for whom Bonchamps commanded pardon on the point of dying.  In executing this monument I wanted to repay, as far as I could, my father's debt of gratitude.

Note of David d'Angers on an engraving (quoted Jouin, David d'Angers, p.150-151)

Here are a few additional notes on David d'Angers's famous monument to Bonchamps in the Abbey church at Saint-Florent.

The Father

David d'Angers always maintained that he executed the monument in recognition of Bonchamps's humanity, as personally experienced by his father.  Pierre-Louis David (1756-1821) had been a successful decorative sculptor in Angers. He was an enthusiastic patriot and volunteered in the Republican army in 1793.  In a notice written in 1838, David recalled that his father was a daring soldier, who was often entrusted with dangerous missions.  Having been wounded and captured at the Battle of Torfou (19th September 1793), he found himself among the prisoners liberated at Saint-Florent on the orders of Bonchamps. He subsequently retired from active service to a post in army administration, but remained a lifelong ardent supporter of the Revolution, an allegiance which he handed on to his son.

Bonchamps spares the Republican prisoners

 

Bonchamps "from a contemporary  portrait",
reproduced in Baguenier-Desormeaux,
Bonchamps et le passage de la Loire (1896)

We must not deceive ourselves; - we must not aim at worldly rewards - they would be below the purity of our motives and the sanctity of our cause.  We must not even aspire to human glory;  civil wars give not that.
Words of Bonchamps, reported in the Memoirs of his wife p.7-8.

The Retreat to Saint-Florent

On 17th October 1793 the Grande Armée Catholique et Royale attacked Republican troops at Cholet.  After a terrible battle that lasted thirty-six hours, the Republicans were left masters of the field.

The two Vendean generals, D'Elbée and Bonchamps, had both been seriously wounded.  They were evacuated from the battlefield in full view of their demoralised troops.  D'Elbée, despite sixteen wounds, was carried away by his brother-in-law Duhoux d'Hauterie on horseback.  The faithful soldiers of Bonchamps took turns to bear by stretcher their beloved chief, who had been hit by grapeshot in the belly.  One of their number Louis Onillon, carried beside them the flag of the division of the Bords de la Loire (See Deniau, p. 57) According to the eye-witness account of  Poirier de Beauvais, Bonchamps spent the night at Beaupréau, in the house of a Madame de Bonnet, arriving about nine o'clock in the evening. D'Elbee, who had preceded him there, was taken by ox-cart to a neighbouring farm and subsequently evacuated to Noirmoutier. Bonchamps too stayed only a short time in Beaupréau since by early  morning on the 18th October he was in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, at the house of Mme Duval in the lower town.    

In the meantime, the defeated Vendean forces began to gather in Saint-Florent, where it had been Bonchamps intention to cross the Loire.  In the absence of the senior commanders, the marquis de Donnissan,  president of the Supreme Council,  took charge of operations and, seconded by the Chevalier des Essarts, sent orders to surrounding parishes to assemble. Estimates have it as many as sixty thousand ragged soldiers gathered in the town, with perhaps twenty thousand women and children.  With them arrived several thousand Republican prisoners under the guard of Cesbron d'Argonne, a fierce veteran of almost 60, until recently the royalist governor of Cholet. The prisoners were shut up in the Abbey buildings or assembled in the surrounding town. They clearly posed an acute dilemma, since they could neither be taken across the river, nor simply left behind to rejoin the enemy forces. The third alternative was clearly to kill them.

Lescure crosses the Loire

 Jules Girardet (1856–1946).

General de Lescure, wounded, crossing the Loire from Saint-Florent with his defeated army

Oil on canvas, signed and dated 1882. 152 cm x 249 cm.

Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead

Here is a striking image of the conflict in the Vendée to be admired in an unexpected location! 

Girardet's canvas captures the moment when the stricken general Lescure was ferried across the Loire from Saint-Florent, with his wife, daughter and father-in-law.  

Lescure had been shot in the head by a musket ball and seriously wounded at  La Tremblaye on  15th October 1793, just prior to the decisive Royalist defeat at Cholet.  He had opposed the crossing  and declared his wish to die in the Vendée, but in the end he had little choice.  He was carried slowly and painfully by his men on the long retreat of the Vendéan army, to die finally at Laval on 2nd November.  His passage across the Loire is described vividly in the Memoirs of his widow, the Marquise de La Rochejaquelein: 

Saint-Florent-le-Vieil (2)

 [continued from previous post]

 

17th-19th October 1793:  The Army of the Vendée crosses the Loire

If Saint-Florent saw the beginning of the conflict in the Vendée, in October 1793 it was to  witness its critical turning-point, as the Royalist forces crossed the Loire and turned West at the start of the Virée de Galerne.  

On the evening of 16th October at Beaupréau, Bonchamps's plan to extend the war to Brittany had been reluctantly agreed by the Royalist leadership.  A detachment under the orders of Autichamp, Bonchamps's aide-de-camp, successfully secured the commune of Varades on the north bank, directly opposite Saint-Florent, and the way now stood open.   However, the catastrophic defeat at Cholet on 17th October, meant that the crossing took place under chaotic conditions. Both  D'Elbée and Bonchamps had been gravely wounded.  The mass of dispirited troops retreated in disarray first to Beaupréau, then in the evening to Saint-Florent.  On the same night, 17th October, the crossing began.  It continued throughout the next day, principally from Saint-Florent, and Cul-de-boeuf a short distance upstream.  Due to the shortage of boats, huge numbers of Vendeans found themselves crowded together on the riverback. Several thousand Republican prisoners who had been brought into the town were famously liberated by order of  Bonchamps, who was taken across the Loire and died at the village of Meilleraie on the evening of the 18th.

The site of the crossing can be surveyed evocatively from the steep hill of Saint-Florent, surmounted by the Abbey church and the wide expanse of the Place d'Armes.  Below, the Loire is broad and shallow, with a flat bank, which must have been far too small to accommodate the press of people gathered on it. According to Mme de La Rochejaquelein there were only twenty or so boats, though there were doubtless other improvised rafts.  A first branch of the river, with dykes and low water levels, could be forded on foot "with water to half-way up the body".  In the centre was the Ile Batailleuse and then the second branch of the river, whilst at the foot of the hill of Varades, yet a third branch had to be negotiated. The horsemen swam across with their horses. The weather was reported to be cold, but without wind to make waves on the river;  elsewhere it was described as "calm" but with a cold wind.There is record of only one woman ,plus  three horses, drowning.

Saint-Florent-le-Vieil (1)

 On the way back from Nantes to Dieppe we stopped off at Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, one of the key "places of memory" of the War in the Vendée. The little town, to the north of Cholet, occupies a strategic promontory over the Loire at the entry to the Mauges, later the heartland of the Army of Anjou.  It was here that the war is traditionally said to have begun, on 12th March 1793.

 It was only a flying visit - just enough time to take in the atmosphere and see the famous tomb of Bonchamps  sculpted by David d'Angers.  

12th March 1793:  The War in the Vendée begins

John Haycraft visited Saint-Florent in 1989 in the company of the local historian and ardent Royalist Dominique Lambert de La Douasnerie: 

When we asked Dominique about the start of the insurrection, he took us to the little town of St-Florent-le-Vieil, which is not far south of Angers.  Approaching it from the north bank of the Loire, we could see the houses jostling up the hill to a picturesque church with a spire.  Most of St Florent was burnt in 1793.  However, it was rebuilt shortly afterwards, and still looks much like old prints, standing beyond the flat islands in the river, on which tall poplars stand, their small leaves rustling in the breeze.

We stopped beyond the suspension bridge on the Place Maubert.  "It was here," said Dominique, dramatically, "that the war started."

He looked round at the old houses in the little square. "On Sunday March 12th, 1793, on this spot, the municipal authorities announced that lots would be drawn for conscription, as there were insufficient volunteers for the army.  Hitherto, the Vendeans had accepted the Revolution passively, but they were certainly not prepared to leave their farms and fight on distant frontiers for ideals they detested.  They resented, too, that the municipal authorities and the National Guard were exempt from conscription, and that the burden therefore fell mainly on them.  Protesting, the crowd jostled the officials and several young men were arrested and taken to the local jail.

The Place Maubert  - nowadays truncated by the D752 as it enters the town via a suspension bridge

"The following Tuesday," continued Dominique, "more than 2,000 peasants marched into the town, wearing white royalist cockades.  As the confronted the municipality and shouted to them to suspend the drawing of lots, the National Guard panicked and fired.  The crowd then surged forward, and the Guard fled down the slope, just there, to the river."  We walked through a narrow passageway between an old chapel, now a museum, and an ugly, rectangular cinema, and descended a cobbled path through trees to the banks of the river.  Before us, the Loire flowed swiftly past.   "The National Guards took refuge there, on those islands, and the town was in the hands of the insurgents."