Professional Documents
Culture Documents
5)
Subject : History
(For under graduate student)
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History
Lesson – 6.1.5
Paper-6: History of Modern Europe, 1780-1945
Topic: Revolution and Gender, Revolutionary
Culture
Lecture: 5
Women played a significant role in the French Revolution.
One of the abiding portrayals we have is from Dickens’s
Tale of Two Cities – the picture of Madame Defarge
sitting beside the guillotine. In contemporary engravings
and paintings there are pictures of women in the
barricades, in the long bread queues and generally mixed
with the revolutionary crowd during almost each of the
revolutionary insurrections. Another clear imprint is that
of women leading a long procession to bring back the
‘baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy’ from
Versailles to Paris that at a level crystallized the
revolution.
Yet there were men who did support the women’s rights
like Condorcet (1743-1794). In 1790 Condorcet
published an article in a newspaper on the question of
women’s rights. He said, either everyone has rights or no
one has rights, that women should have as many political
rights and other kinds of rights as men. But Condorcet’s
voice was a rarity in France during the revolution.
Architecture
In the sphere of architecture the aim was to create a new
physical environment in sync with a new cultural order.
‘Etienne Boullee’s drawings were part of his plans for a
new public space on the Champs Elysees; Pierre
Rousseau’s designs for the redevelopment of the Ecole
des Beaux Arts quartier; …Francois Verly’s project for a
new city centre in Lille –all of them foreshadow the
architectural arrogance that the two Napoleons later
imposed on le vieux Paris’. (Lewis).
All these indicated that there was a shift even in the way
architecture or space was being planned in the cities. But
there was a return to antiquity rather than innovative
creativity. One historian suggests that there was a
degree of ‘modernism’. But ultimately the Doric column,
the obelisk and the rotunda won hands down’. This
cultural shift from Rococo to the Neo-Classical was in
intellectual harmony with the “rational”, physical universe
of the Enlightenment.’
Painting
Jacques David was an outstanding painter of the period,
bringing new and revolutionary sensibility to his creation.
For him the revolution was an opportunity for artistic
regeneration, as well as emancipation from the stultifying
influence of the royal Academie. In the process, he
contributed to the cultural formation of a nation. He
declared, ‘French Nation! It is your glory that I wish to
propagate’. He added that offer to the people of the
world, present and future as well. His paintings of the
Tennis-Court Oath, and the Assassination of Marat for
example have become immortal. David was also the
‘Pageant-Master of the republic’ and in this capacity
contributed greatly to the organization of the festivals
and revolutionary fetes which were perhaps the most
successful of the efforts to imprint the message of the
revolution on the minds of the people. As Mona Ozouf
puts it, ‘the festivals transferred the sacrality associated
with the religious culture of the ancien regime on to the
political and social plane’.