Not just a Revolution for the young.....

A National Guardsman and his wife by Rémy-Furcy Descarsin (1746-1793)
73cm x 90.5 cm.  Oil.
Signed "Descarsin, painter to Monsieur, brother of the King 1791"
Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille

This lovely painting was acquired by the Musée de la Révolution Française, Vizille in 2004, having recently come up for public auction.  A piece of political propaganda certainly, but as an unpatronising portait of two ordinary people, it shows the legacy of the Revolution at its best.

Of the painter, Rémy-Furcy Descarsin,  little is known.  He was active in Paris and failed to gain entry to the Academy of Painting in 1789 when he submitted a self-portrait. Apparently he had two musical sisters.  He styled himself painter to the comte de Provence, dating the painting  to before the latter's successful flight from Paris in June 1791.  The title is a bit puzzling; clearly the man is too old to be an active National Guardsman. In fact the uniform is purely symbolic. The subjects were an old couple from Nantes, who were the recipients of charitable attention from the local Jacobins.  Here is a contemporary account from the Annales Nantaises : 

2nd February 1791
A married couple, aged more than a hundred ("plus que centenaires") from the former diocese of Angers, named René Dogereau or Degro, and Perrine Trouillard, were living near the former Hermitage, in a state of abandonment and distress.  The Amis de la Constitution, who had heard about them though their inquiries after recommendations for public charity, awarded to these old people a pension which would continue to to be paid to whichever of the two remained living.  To give them an idea of the Revolution, which they could not expect to enjoy for long, they dressed them up in clothes in the three national colours.  The Compagnie des Adolescents then fetched them and took them to the Theatre, to performances of The Family Supper  and The Three Farmers which were put on in their benefit.  Dogereau, had been a wine grower, a ferryman and finally a caulker of boats.  He died a short time ago but his wife is still alive and still has the use of her senses. p.581-582.

References
Annales Nantaises,by  Michel Guimar, published in Year III of the Republic http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7k8TAAAAQAAJ&q=p.158#v=onepage&q=dogereau&f=false

For a discussion of the painting, see : http://www.lafoliedix-huitieme.eu/peinture/garde-national-femme-t3682.html

Fouquier-Tinville at Christmas

Légendes de Noël 

A very merry Christmas!

The following is an abridged translation of a story from G. Lenotre's Légendes de Noël, a series of Christmas tales set in the Revolution and Empire, first published in 1910.

Lenotre (Louis Léon Théodore Gosselin) was a great historian and unusual for his time in his willingness to extend sympathies to both sides of the Revolutionary struggle. In this story, he finds humanity in one of the most hated figures of the Terror, the Public Prosecutor Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville.

I have been unable to trace the comte de Courville, but Lenotre's view of Fouquier-Tinville is certainly based on details fully documented elsewhere in his work. Accurate too is the description of Séraphin's famous silhouette theatre which operated in the Palais-Royal, to patriotic enthusiasm, throughout the darkest days of the Revolution.




In the time of the Terror, a passerby at night who walked along the quai de l’Horloge, under the walls of the Palais de Justice, would quicken his step and, take care, out of instinct, not to raise his head.  In one of the windows next to the towers of the Conciergerie, a light burned from dawn to dusk which, as far as it could be seen, made the people of Paris tremble in fear.

 This light illuminated the cell where worked, day and night, Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor, the feared magistrate who furnished the Revolutionary Tribunal with its required quota of accused and the guillotine with its daily harvest of heads. The life of this man, whose tragic name weighed over Paris like the legendary sword over the head of Damocles, was one of crushing labour.  He slept three or four hours a day, rarely more.  For twenty hours at a stretch, he prepared the work of the death-machine, a colossal task which he would entrust to no-one else.

Stop press: Robespierre reconstructed!

What do you know?!  Robespierre and his death mask have made the headlines!  Mulhouse-based facial reconstruction expert, Philippe Froesch used advanced FBI techniques to create this image from a plaster copy of the Tussaud mask, now in the Museum of Natural History in Aix-en-Provence. 

A monument in honour of the Bourbons

Earlier this year I went to an exhibition at the Sir John Soane Museum, "Northern Vision: Master Drawings from the Tchoban Foundation" (June-September 2013).  There were all sorts of great architectural fantasies - the peach was a design for a truly mega 1930s Palace of Soviets.  Also included were a couple of noteworthy 18th-century French confections. The first is a drawing submitted for the 1772 Grand Prix of the Academy of Architecture by Louis-Jean Desprez (1743-1804) for a "Monument in honour of the Bourbons":  unsurprisingly it didn't win. (How the Revolutionaries would have enjoyed tearing this down if it had ever been built!)

Commemorative Monument in Honour of the Bourbons 1772
Pen, Indian ink, brown ink, applied to a sketch in black chalk

Signed Desprez invenit on the base, in pen and brown ink

Copyright: Tchoban Foundation

Image courtesy of Sir John Soane Museum

"This highly complex drawing was produced by Desprez for the 1772 Grand Prix of the French Academy of Architecture. Here, he has designed a monument based on a circular temple or tholos. The architecture is richly adorned with symbols and allegorical statues evocative of the Bourbon dynasty, including fleur-de lis, suns, Gallicroosters and the intertwined initials ‘L’ and ‘H’ representing the current Bourbon monarch Louis XVI and the founder of the dynasty Henri IV.
The capitals of the temple’s columns are based on those of the ‘French Order’ developed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and used in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Perhaps because of this overly complex decorative scheme,Desprez failed to win the Grand Prix with this submission. He left France in 1784 to enter the service of the King of Sweden, Gustave III."

The second offering is a Hercules by Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801) intended to adorn the Napoleonic Cisalpine Republic.  It is probably as well that this neo-classical delight never made it past the drawingboard - it would have been 83 feet tall!

 Hercules of Gaul, or the Victorious French People

in the image of Hercules (1800-01);
Ennemond Alexandre Petitot (1727-1801).
Copyright: Tchoban Foundation.

Image courtesy of Sir John Soane Museum.

"Although born and trained as an architect in France, Petitot worked mainly in Italy. Having won the Grand Prix of the Academy of Architecture in 1745, at the age of eighteen, he took up a residency in Rome the following year, where he joined the ranks of French ‘Piranesians’, such as Clérisseau, Vien, Challe and Le Lorrain. In 1753 he entered the service of the Duke of Parma and founded the Academy of Fine Arts there. This drawing probably relates to a plan for a new district of Milan, which between 1797 and 1802 was the capital of the Cisalpine Republic – a short-lived French client state founded byNapoleon. Hercules of Gaul was a particularly popular subject during the French Revolution. Petitot based his figure on a well-known antique statue but with the addition of the French cockerel."

Notice and notes from the Exhibition: 
http://www.soane.org/exhibitions/northern-vision-master-drawings-from-the-tchoban-foundation

Aviary of Madame Helvétius

The Aviary of Madame Helvetius is a mawkishly sentimental little fable published in 1809 as part of a set of "Instructional narratives" for little girls, by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (1763-1842), who is remembered today chiefly as the librettist of Beethoven's Fidelio. In the story, a tame pigeon is sent to Madame bearing an anonymous begging letter; she trustingly obliges and has her money returned in due course, to outpourings of uplifting emotion, by a pretty member  of the "deserving poor" .  As far as I know Bouilly had no personal connection and is merely echoing Madame H's well-known kindness and fondness for birds. 

Last glimpses of Madame Helvétius

The house in Auteuil

Plaque on the site of the house

There are no surviving pictures of Madame Helvétius's house, then 24 Grande rue d’Auteuil, a country property nestling close to the Bois de Bologne between the royal Château of Coq (now demolished)  and the village of Auteuil.  The immense estate of the comtesse du Boufflers - now the exclusive Villa Montmorency compound, home to politicians and film stars -  was just over the way.

The property was described in the deeds of sale as consisting of the house, which bordered the road, and a small pavilion, situated at the bottom of a park of two arpents in length.(An "arpent" was 78 yards, so, depending on width, we are envisaging an acre or two).

Built in about 1720, the main body of the house was flanked by two straight wings and included an elegant peristyle.  A pretty iron gate led onto a courtyard containing a well and aviaries for Madame's many birds. 

Antoine Guillois, writing in 1894, gives a detailed description of the interior culled from the memoirs of Ambroise Firmin-Didot and other local residents who were children at the time. Visitors entering by the coach entrance, found themselves on the ground floor where there was a kitchen, larder and greenhouse and a bathroom with a window onto the road. On the first floor, reached via a fine wrought iron staircase, was a spacious dining room with views onto both the road and courtyard, a grand salon which could accommodate up to fifty people, and two smaller reception rooms. 

 Guillois's youthful observers seemed to have been oddly preoccupied with details of furnishings - in the dining room: oak sideboard, table and side tables, five cane armchairs, chair covered with tapestry, gilded console and a  marble  basin mounted on the wall;  in the mirrored salon:  chiffonier with marble top, tables, settees with feather cushions and a whole assortment of other chairs and sofas upholstered in blue and white, plus a daybed with a blue damask cover; on the fireplace an enormous display of flowers in a blue porcelain bowl.

 Across from the salon, the mistress's bedroom boasted more fine quality furniture and hangings of blue velvet and taffeta.  French window gave out onto the terrace which commanded a view of the garden and which was shaded by a magnificent acacia with profuse blossom.  It was here every morning that Madame would come to feed the birds. Rhododendrons, hortensias, roses and other plants flourished under the care of her chief gardener Richard. The pavilion in which La Roche and Cabanis lodged was approached by an avenue of lime trees and consisted of two bedrooms, a dining room and kitchen plus a salon with a central dome. There was also a small vegetable garden where the various children who frequented the house were given their own little plots to tend.

Franklin relics from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
The Dresden china cups and saucers were a present from Madame Helvetius.
According to Guillois, Madame's linen and tablewhere were those of a "modest bourgeoise"

Madame Helvétius during the Revolution

In the dying years of the Ancien Régime, the void at Auteuil left by Franklin's departure was filled by a new generation of habitués, the poet Antoine Roucher, author of a vast and almost unreadable poem The Months, André Chenier, an intimate friend of Cabanis, Volney, the liberal nobles Destutt de Tracy and  Eymar, and Condorcet, who in early 1789 brought his young wife to be presented to Madame.  These men greeted the  bright dawn of Revolution with uniform enthusiasm, with the exception only of the abbé Morellet, who, as a consequence, broke with Cabanis and La Roche and  moved out with his furniture to a house in the valley of Montmorency at Cernay.  Volney, Sieyès, Chamfort and La Chaise, the deputy for Brivé, now took up almost permanent residence.  Cabanis, arriving from Paris on 15th July, was introduced to Mirabeau and became his close collaborator.

In the Revolution's first years of liberal promise, the gentle abbé La Roche, true to his antique exemplars, abandoned his leisured life of book collecting to enter the public arena. He was elected mayor of Auteuil ("the fat Mayor" quipped Cabanis) and later, though never having exercised ecclesiastical functions, took on the role of constitutional priest to protect the refractory incumbant and his flock.  Both he and Cabanis featured prominently in a civic festival at Auteuil on 3 July 1791 in which a stone from the Bastille was installed in the Church (in which Madame's property entitled her to a private pew). It was La Roche who pronounced the opening discourse inviting the inhabitants of the village to "live as brothers and remain united to resist the chains of slavery." 

The Church of Notre-Dame, Auteuil, rebuilt in the late 19th century

A year later, on 5 August 1792, a second fête inaugurated, on a piece of ground next to Madame Helvétius's house, a new Town Hall in the style of a Grecian temple, containing busts of Rousseau, Voltaire, Franklin, Helvétius himself and Mirabeau.  In the list of patriotic contributions Madame pledged 4,500 livres; Cabanis 1,200 and La Roche 900. André Chenier meanwhile saw his play Charles IX performed to acclaim before an audience which included Mirabeau, Danton, Desmoulins and Fabre d'Eglantine.  Cabanis attended the dying Mirabeau as his physician but still returned faithfully to Madame Helvétius, herself ill and anxious if he was absent. He and La Roche now allied themselves closely with Condorcet, who in September 1792 established himself nearby at 2 Grande rue.  

Marc Louis Arlaud,
 Portrait of Pierre-Jean-Georges
Cabanis
 (1757-1808)

The Terror brought proscription and arrest.  Roucher was imprisoned, as were Chamfort, Ginguené and Volney, and Condorcet was forced into hiding. In Auteuil itself Destutt de Tracy and the abbé La Roche were both detained, La Roche arrested in November 1793 and held first in the Abbaye, then in the Carmes prison and released only after the death of Robespierre.  D'Andlau, Madame Helvétius's son-in-law, was briefly arrested and subsequently emigrated, although her daughters were protected, declared daughters of the Nation, in memory of their father. 

 Although personally safe, the elderly lady was deeply affected by events of the Terror and talked constantly of her friends that had disappeared and that she hoped to see again.  On one occasion, obliged to go to Paris to visit her daughter who was sick, she fainted on the Place de la Revolution. Cabanis dedicated his Mélanges de littérature to her, composed, he said, to distract her from the mournful preoccupations left by the terrible experience of the Revolution. 

At the height of the Terror, she had apparently hidden a considerable amount of money in the park, but forgotten its whereabouts. The sale deeds carried a clause stipulating what to do if it was ever recovered (which it never was).

After Thermidor  the life of the salon recovered, and its surviving members  -   Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, Volney, Garat, Ginguené, Daunou - formed the core of the so-called "Idéologues",  leading lights in the reconstruction of intellectual institutions under the Directory and Empire. In May 1795 Cabanis married Charlotte-Felicité de Grouchy, sister of Madame Condorcet and the couple came to live in the pavillion.  Bonaparte himself visited and commented on the smallness of the park, to which Madame Helvétius famously replied,  "You cannot know General, how much happiness is to be found in three arpents of land".


Death and burial

"Notre Dame d'Auteuil" died on 13th August 1800 at the age of 81. She had retained her habit of rising early and had contracted a chest infection at the end of winter, which neither Cabanis nor his colleague Pierre de Roussel could cure.  In her final days, she had with her Cabanis, his wife and two daughters, La Roche and Jean-Antoine-Cauvin Gallois, the Tribune and friend of Cabanis, who had lived with her since 1793.  According to her wishes she was buried at the end of her park in a vault constructed on the right side of the pavillon. Helen Maria Williams recalled that "she always spoke with calmness of death, and pointed out to me the spot in her garden where her remains were to be deposited".  Her burial, without formal religious ceremony, is described by her grandson Jean-Antoine-Claude-Adrien de Mun in a letter to  Mme de Staël, dated 31st August 1800; he  mentions neither the vault nor the the pavillion, but confirms that the coffin was placed in a tomb dug in her garden in accordance with her wishes.

Tomb of Madame Helvétius, who lies next
 to heart of Cabanis in the Auteuil cemetery

Although she left the property to her granddaughters Madame willed enjoyment of the house to Cabanis and La Roche in the hope that they would continue to live there and watch over her ashes.  This was not to be. The latter, a member of the corps législatif since 1799 retired to Orville in the Pas-de-Calais in 1803 where he died in 1806. Cabanis unexpectedly died in May 1808, his body transported to the Pantheon but his heart buried in the garden next to Madame Helvétius. In 1817, when the property left the family definitively, her remains were transferred to the nearby cemetery. After a first monument was destroyed in the bombardment of 1871, it was not until 1892 that a replacement tombstone was finally erected by public subscription.

In modern Paris, no trace survives of the house.  An anonymous apartment block occupies the site, now 59 rue d'Auteuil

59 rue d'Auteuil today

"Drama of 59 rue d'Auteuil"

École Normale Israelite
 Orientale.
which occupied the site
 from the 1870s.

The property was rented from 1808 by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, the American-born physicist, who had married Lavoisier's widow. It then changed hands several times before being bought in 1854 by Prince Pierre-Napoléon Bonaparte, whose father Lucien Bonaparte had once frequented Madame's salon; the "drama of 59 rue d'Auteuil" brought brief notoriety when Bonaparte was challenged to a duel and, refusing, short dead his opponent's emissary.  During the Commune the Fédérés briefly established a headquarters in the house but, learning that it had belonged to Bonaparte, decided to burn it down instead.  In July 1877 the small pavilion used by Morellet and Cabanis was also demolished.  In latter times the site was occupied by the École Normale Israelite Orientale.


References

Antoine Guillois, Le salon de  Mme Helvétius (1892)
https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24820536M/Le_salon_de_Madame_Helv%C3%A9tius
M. Guillois was the great-grandson of Antoine Roucher and seems to be the main source of  factual information on day-to-day life chez Madame Helvétius.

Helen Maria Williams, "Death of Madame Helvétius" in Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic, Vol. 2 (1801) [Available on Google Books]
.
Guy de la Prade, L'illustre société d'Auteuil 1772-1830, ou, La fascination de la liberté (1989)
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NNRwIR-h7ZMC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[Free extracts on Google Books include a good chapter on the Revolution in Auteuil]

Details of 59 rue d'Auteuil in a website devoted to the 16th arrondissement :
http://mapage.noos.fr/hubert.demory/maison-helvetius.htm

The cemetery at Auteuil: 
http://www.landrucimetieres.fr/spip/spip.php?article1544  






Note of 23/09/2015

I recently came across this anonymous terracotta bust of Mme Helvétius.  It was Lot 48 in the sale of the Collection Paul Rousseau held in Toulon on 24 March 2012.
http://www.liveauctioneers.com/catalog/
28854_historical-souvenirs-about-french-revolution/page1?rows=20

Madame Helvétius's cats

Jean Jacques Bachelier, White angora cat chasing a butterfly
Musée Lambinet.

As a cat-lover I have a soft spot for Madame Helvétius, who counted among her considerable menagerie, as well as numerous chickens, pigeons and canaries, "twenty Angoras". The cats were apparently bedecked in fur-lined sateen jackets from September to June, though it seems unlikely Madame could have wrestled more than a few favourites into this costume: if only we had a picture! The names of some of them - Aza, Le Noir, Courtois, Musette, Pompon  - are recorded: Ben Franklin complained lightheartedly to Cabanis that Madame was an ingrate for not granting him one of her nights, which she always spent solely in the company of Pompon (or "Poupon" as Franklin has it).  (p.61) 

Citoyenne Mignot, "amie de Couthon".

Couthon from a 19th engraving

Georges Couthon was the object of a weirdly obsessive adulation from one of his female admirers which throws an interesting light on the relationships between Revolutionaries and the highly charged emotional atmosphere of the Year II.  The backdrop was Couthon's mission to his native Puy-de-Dome in September 1793, above all his triumphant return to Clermont-Ferrand in November 1793 following the surrender of Lyons.  At this moment of greatest triumph, Couthon was the object of much adoring attention, taken up in a flurry of escorts, dinners and receptions, surrounded by men vying to carry the him around and pursued, by all accounts, by a chorus of excited women.  Among them none was more strange than Suzanne Mignot, who, according to the Avergnat historian Francisque Mège, had plunged into extreme revolutionary politics as a result of a failed marriage and apparently saw in Couthon a kind of god of republicanism.  According to Mège Citoyenne Mignot was a believer in Mesmerism, through which she tried to cure the many infirmities of her idol. In order to be near him she become the close friend of his wife.  She followed Couthon and Mme.Couthon to Lyons, haunted them in their home at Clermont and later came to in Paris - she may indeed have lived in Passy, where Couthon is known to have had a residence. According to family tradition she eventually became completely insane and died in an asylum in Paris in about 1820.

Georges Couthon (and his dog!)





Georges-Auguste Couthon at the National Convention in 1793
Black chalk drawing
Metropolitan Museum New York, Acquired 1962

Suddenly the eighteenth century seems beset with dogs!  This sketch by Vivant Denon, now in the Metropolitan Museum, represents a rare portrait of Couthon. We are told he did indeed own a white pug, by name of Bramm, that seldom left his lap in the Convention (Cabanès, p.226). 

Death mask of Robespierre

Musée Carnavalet

Isn't it great?  I came across this completely deranged image in an e-version of an old French book Behind the scenes in the Terror by Hector Fleischmann ( English version 1914). There is no further comment or explanation.

Hutton Collection

Fleischmann is still regularly acknowledged as author of the most detailed study of Robespierre death masks, but frustratingly his little monograph is unobtainable, apart from a few snippets on Google Books. Apparently he was a sceptic:  "Many death masks of Robespierre exist, all false, reconstituted after the fact from portraits", summarises Antoine de Baecque, (p.167).   

It is surprisingly difficult to pin down what  Robespierre "death masks" actually existed.  Vivant Denon once owned one. The only two examples documented on the internet are in the Hutton Collection and a bronze in the Musée Carnavalet, both copies from Madame Tussaud's original mould. There is no clear  provenance accessible in either case.

References

Hector Fleischmann, Behind the scenes in the Terror (1914), plate.p.128. http://archive.org/stream/
behindscenesinte00fleiuoft#page/128/mode/2up

_______,  Le masque mortuaire de Robespierre. Documents nouveaux pour servir d’intelligence et de conclusion à une polémique historique..., Paris, E. Leroux (1911) 26 p.
.http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/
Le_masque_mortuaire_de_Robespierre.html?id=7BI7AQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

Hutton collection: Death mask, from the original in Tussaud Gallery, London.
http://library.princeton.edu/libraries/
firestone/rbsc/aids/C0770/ex28.jpg

 Portraits in plaster from the collection of Laurence Hutton (1894) p.75
http://archive.org/stream/portraitsinplas02huttgoog#page/n99/mode/2up


  Antoine de Baecque, Glory and terror : seven deaths under the French Revolution (2001)[Relevant passages are available in the preview on Amazon or Google Books].Reproduction of the Carnavalet head , p.144.

See also the discussion:  http://revolution-fr.livejournal.com/53118.html