Abstract
On 20 June 1789, the members of the newly-established National Assembly swore the famous Tennis Court Oath: not to separate until they had given the polity a new constitution. This chapter examines Jacques-Louis David’s ambitious—and never finished—attempt to capture this revolutionary moment. It inquires into how his Tennis Court Oath allows and invites one to sense the nation and its sovereignty. It does so by considering the Oath as, in turn, Monument, Portrait, and Tableau.
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Notes
- 1.
She writes: “No power without an image.” Mondzain, Marie-José. 2005. Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 158.
- 2.
Lefort, Claude. 1988. The Permanence of the Theologico-Political? In Democracy and Political Theory. Trans. D. Macey. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 219.
- 3.
- 4.
We use italics when writing of David’s work and no italics when writing of the event itself. In both cases, we capitalize “Oath”.
- 5.
The Assembly had only been in existence for three days; it was composed mostly of the representatives of the Third Estate of France, assembled in Versailles for an Estates General called by the King to consult his subjects on the question of the kingdom’s finances—the first Estates General since 1614.
- 6.
Tackett, Timothy. 1996. Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 146, but in reference to the oath of 17 June. See also Stefan Huygebaert’s chapter in this volume.
- 7.
Tackett, 1996. 120.
- 8.
As found in Tackett, 1996. 147.
- 9.
Tackett, 1996. 211.
- 10.
Tackett, 1996. 153.
- 11.
Bordes, Philippe. 1983. Le Serment du Jeu de Paume de Jacques-Louis David. Le peintre, son milieu et son temps de 1789 à 1792. Paris: Ministère de la culture. Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 15.
- 12.
Bordes, 1983. 48.
- 13.
Bordes, 1983. 44.
- 14.
Bordes, 1983. 53–54.
- 15.
Loty, Laurent. 2009. L’inachèvement emblématique du serment de jeu de paume. Dix-huitième siècle 41:1, 35.
- 16.
Roberts, Warren. 2000. Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis Prieur: Revolutionary Artists, The Public, The Populace, and Images of the French Revolution. Albany: State University of New York Press, 258.
- 17.
Dowd, David Lloyd. 1948. Pageant-master of the Republic: Jacques-Louis David and the French Revolution. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. & Roberts, as n. 16, 258.
- 18.
Johnson, Dorothy. 1993. Jacques-Louis David: Art in Metamorphosis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 73.
- 19.
Bordes, 1983. 30.
- 20.
Bordes, 1983. 86.
- 21.
Bordes, 1983. 85.
- 22.
Loty, 2009. 38.
- 23.
Bordes, 1983. 54.
- 24.
See, e.g., Loty, 2009. 35.
- 25.
Williams, Raymond. 1995. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- 26.
Marin, 1988.
- 27.
De Baecque, Antoine. 1993. The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770-1800. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 194.
- 28.
Reichardt, Rolf and Hubertus Kohle. 2008. Visualizing the Revolution: Politics and the Pictorial Arts in Late Eighteenth-century France. London: Reaktion Books, 92.
- 29.
Bordes, 1983. 165: “O ma patrie! O ma chère patrie! nous ne serons donc plus obligés d’aller chercher dans l’histoire des peuples anciens, de quoi exercer nos pinceaux… Non, l’histoire d’aucun peuple ne m’offre rien de si grand, de si sublime que ce serment du Jeu de Paume… Nation française! C’est ta gloire que je veux propager…”
- 30.
Bordes, 1983. 149: “le temple du patriotisme”.
- 31.
Bordes, 1983. 149: “la plus grande leçon que jamais ait offert aucun monument”.
- 32.
Bordes, 1983. 149: “répéter le serment qui a sauvé la France”.
- 33.
Bordes, 1983. 150: “le plus utile monument de courage et de patriotisme qu’aucun siècle ait jamais produit”.
- 34.
Pommier, Édouard. 1991. L’art de la liberté: Doctrines et débats de la Révolution française. Paris: Gallimard, 39–41.
- 35.
- 36.
See Angela Condello’s chapter in this volume (Chap. 11, p. 263).
- 37.
Johnson, 1993. 77.
- 38.
Johnson, 1993. 77.
- 39.
Johnson, 1993. 77. It is worth comparing d’Angers’s pediment relief to Léopold Morice’s high relief at the place de la République.
- 40.
See, e.g., Bordes, 1983. 42.
- 41.
Bordes, 1983. 150: “vrais amis de la constitution” and “l’auteur de Brutus et des Horaces, ce Français patriote, dont le génie a devancé la Révolution”.
- 42.
- 43.
Johnson, 1993. 60.
- 44.
And besides his Brutus and Death of Socrates. Trey, Juliette and de Baecque, Antoine. 2008. Le Serment du Jeu de paume: quand David réécrit l’histoire. Versailles: Éditions Artyis, 18.
- 45.
Johnson, 1993. 8.
- 46.
Johnson, 1993. 14.
- 47.
Johnson, 1993. 69.
- 48.
De Baecque, 1993. 186.
- 49.
On David’s representation of “grand hommes”, see, e.g., Johnson, 1993. 74.
- 50.
Roberts, 2000. 245.
- 51.
Johnson, 1993. 66.
- 52.
Crow, Thomas. 1985. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 220.
- 53.
Crow, 1985. 227.
- 54.
Crow, 1985. 227.
- 55.
Crow, 1985. 221.
- 56.
Here as well as two paragraphs below, we borrow and adapt the phrase from Roberts who writes of how “David took liberties”. Roberts, 2000. 227.
- 57.
Roberts, 2000. 242.
- 58.
Loty, 2009. 29.
- 59.
Bordes, 1983. 49: “qui ne cachaient pas leur regret d’avoir prêté le serment”.
- 60.
Presenting a petition David himself had signed. Loty, 2009. 32.
- 61.
Loty, 2009. 34.
- 62.
Loty, 2009. 34.
- 63.
The Pantheon’s frontispice reads: “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante”.
- 64.
See Ozouf, Mona. 1998. The Pantheon: The École Normale of the Dead. In Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 3, ed. Pierre Nora, 325–346. Trans. A. Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press.
- 65.
Nora, 1988.
- 66.
- 67.
Reichardt and Kohle, 2008. 41.
- 68.
Of course, what is eye-level for a viewer depends also on the location and height at which the huge work was to be fixed.
- 69.
Johnson, 1993. 84.
- 70.
See, e.g., Fuhrmeister, Christian. 2009. ‘Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis’: The Political Iconography of Lightning in Europe and North America, 1750-1800. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 99, 144–163.
- 71.
See, e.g., Agamben, Giorgio. 2010. The Sacrament of Language: An Archeology of the Oath. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- 72.
Bordes, 1983. 15.
- 73.
Reichardt and Kohle, 2008. 96.
- 74.
Reichardt and Kohle, 2008. 96.
- 75.
Johnson, 1993. 117.
- 76.
Kemp, Wolfgang. 1994. The Theatre of Revolution: A New Interpretation of Jacques-Louis David’s Tennis Court Oath. In Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, 202–227. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 207.
- 77.
As found in Bordes, 1983. 163: “Dans la composition de M. David …on se sent entraîné avant d’avoir pu réfléchir sur la nature de l’illusion que l’on éprouve. On croit assister et prendre part à cette scène immortelle qui a préparé le triomphe de la liberté française…”
- 78.
Bordes, 1983. 59: “appelés à prendre part physiquement et spirituellement au serment”.
- 79.
See, e.g., Agamben, 2010.
- 80.
Althusser, Louis. 1972. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.
- 81.
- 82.
Chaudonneret, Marie-Claude. 2010. Les artistes vivant au Louvre (1791–1848): du musée au bazar. In ‘Ce salon à quoi tout se ramène’: Le Salon de peinture et de sculpture, 1791–1890, ed. James Kearns and Pierre Vaisse, 7–22. Bern: Peter Lang. 7.
- 83.
Caubisen-Lasfargues, Colette. 1961. Le salon de peinture pendant la révolution. In Annales historiques de la révolution française. 164: 193–214. 195ff.
- 84.
Bordes, 1983. 78.
- 85.
Bordes, 1983. 78.
- 86.
Bordes, 1983. 79.
- 87.
See generally Propeck, Lina. 1993. David et le portrait du roi. In David contre David: Actes du colloque organisé au musée du Louvre par le service culturel du 6 au 10 décembre 1989, vol. 1. Ed. Régis Michel, 293–318.
- 88.
Bordes, 1983. 79: “hommage.”
- 89.
Bordes, 1983. 79: “l’autorité monarchique est concedée par la constitution révolutionnaire”.
- 90.
Propeck, 1993. 309: “métaphore du roi en Hercule, devient métaphore du pouvoir national en Hercule” and “homme nouveau”.
- 91.
Propeck, 1993. 299. Writing of the proposed portrait of Louis XVI: “la représentation du nouveau corps souverain regénéré par la Révolution”.
- 92.
Our translation. As found in Berns, Thomas and Frydman, Benoît. 2005. L’esprit de corps pensé: Généologie de l’esprit de corps. In L’esprit de corps, démocratie et espace public, ed. Gilles J. Guglielmi, 159–181. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 172. They cite to Apostolidès, Jean-Marie. 1981. Le Roi-Machine. Spectacle et politique au temps de Louis XIV. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 13: “La nation ne fait pas corps en France, elle réside tout entière dans la personne du Roi”.
- 93.
Berns and Frydman, 2005. 173 cite to Apolostidès, 1981 for the following words pronounced by Louis XV before the Parlement of Paris on 3 March 1766: “Les droits et intérêts de la nation, dit le Roi, dont on ose faire corps séparé du monarque, sont nécessairement unis avec les miens et ne reposent qu’en mes mains” (emphasis is that of Berns and Frydman).
- 94.
As found in Berns and Frydman, 2005. 176. They find these words in Marcel Gauchet, La Révolution des droits de l’homme. 1989. Paris: Gallimard, XVIII: “Le Peuple dans son activité politique n’est que dans la représentation nationale. Il ne fait corps que là”.
- 95.
Bordes, 1983. 33–35.
- 96.
De Baecque, 1993. 8. See also, e.g., Melzer, Sara E. and Norberg, Kathryn, eds. 1988. From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incoporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- 97.
De Baecque, 1993. 30.
- 98.
Chartier, Roger. 1997. On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Languages, and Practices. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 75.
- 99.
De Baecque, 1993. 77.
- 100.
De Baecque, 1993. 77.
- 101.
De Baecque, 1993. 192.
- 102.
De Baecque, 1993. 195–196.
- 103.
De Baecque, 1993. 76.
- 104.
De Baecque, 1993. 96.
- 105.
De Baecque, 1993. 192.
- 106.
De Baecque, 1993. 192 and 195.
- 107.
De Baecque, 1993. 195.
- 108.
De Baecque, 1993. 193: “The composition of the Oath is clearly established according to two axes linked by a certain number of lines of convergence, sometimes broken: 1. A frieze of people in the foreground that represents the expression of the body of the Assembly. 2. The vertical axis drawn from the group of the three religious men and extending up to the head of President Bailly: the heart and face of the body. 3. Finally, the lines of convergence bearing the series of multiple heads and hands: the skeleton of the body.”
- 109.
De Baecque, 1993. 197.
- 110.
De Baecque, 1993. 186.
- 111.
De Baecque, 1993. 191–192.
- 112.
De Baecque, 1993. 196.
- 113.
De Baecque, 1993. 198.
- 114.
De Baecque, 1993. 195.
- 115.
De Baecque, 1993. 196. The words in italics are variations of words de Baecque uses.
- 116.
De Baecque, 1993. 201.
- 117.
De Baecque, 1993. 200.
- 118.
De Baecque, 1993. 8. But writing about the body of the king.
- 119.
Lefort, 1988. 242–243, writing of Michelet on monarchical incarnation.
- 120.
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1957. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 13.
- 121.
- 122.
De Baecque, 1993. 97. One such word is “adunation” used until the sixteenth century “in order to designate the grouping together of the apostles around Christ”.
- 123.
Kantorowicz, 1957. 220.
- 124.
Kantorowicz, 1957. 119, 209.
- 125.
Kantorowicz, 1957. 195.
- 126.
De Baecque, 1993. 195.
- 127.
De Baecque, 1993. 195.
- 128.
De Baecque, 1993. 100.
- 129.
De Baecque, 1993. 99.
- 130.
De Baecque, 1993. 101.
- 131.
De Baecque, 1993. 102.
- 132.
Kantorowicz, 1957. 423.
- 133.
De Baecque, 1993. 102.
- 134.
Schmitter, Amy M. 2002. Representation and the Body of Power in French Academic Painting. 63: Journal of the History of Ideas, 399–424, 400.
- 135.
De Baecque, 1993. 8.
- 136.
Marin, 1988, 12.
- 137.
Marin, 1988, 14.
- 138.
- 139.
Berns & Frydman, 2005, 165: “la figure de l’incarnation qui offre le modèle parfait (et la mesure) de l’incorporation, comme fusion totale de la multiplicité.”
- 140.
Berns & Frydman, 2005, 166: “la nécessité d’aborder la figure de l’incorporation indépendamment du modèle de l’incarnation”.
- 141.
Bordes 1983. 38 and 103, note 117: “Dans l’acte passé par les Américains, tout est calme, et l’on dirait des marchands sages et probes qui contractent un marché. Dans le Jeu de paume de Versailles, tout le monde est en convulsion, et quelques-uns même ont l’attitude de comédiens. Est-ce la faute des acteurs, est-ce la faute du peintre, est-ce la faute de tous? C’est une question curieuse et bonne à approfondir”.
- 142.
Bordes writes that Delécluze, in ascribing convulsion to all the men, misses that Bailly and Sieyès, right at the center, are just as calm as the American men. Bordes, 1983, 38.
- 143.
- 144.
Huet, Marie-Hélène. 1982. Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat’s Death 1793–1797. Berkeley: University of California Press, 35.
- 145.
Buckley, Matthew S. 2006. Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3.
- 146.
Friedland, Paul. 2002. Political Actors: Representative Bodies & Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2.
- 147.
Kemp, Wolfgang. 1994. “The Theatre of Revolution: A New Interpretation of Jacques-Louis David’s Tennis Court Oath” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation, eds. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey. 209.
- 148.
Friedland, 2002. 180.
- 149.
Thévoz, Michel. 1989. Le théâtre du crime: essai sur la peinture de David. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 15: “les députés ont, consciemment ou non, calqué leur prestation sur le Serment des Horaces, à la manière d’un tableau vivant, précisément”. See also Cecilia Feilla. 2013. The Sentimental Theatre of the French Revolution. Farnham: Ashgate, 65.
- 150.
Drawn from the title of Trey and de Baecque, 2008.
- 151.
Buckley, 2006. 38.
- 152.
Feilla, 2013. 87.
- 153.
Feilla 2013. 86.
- 154.
Thévoz, 1989. 8: “Le code de référence de sa peinture, c’est le théâtre.”
- 155.
Feilla, 2013. 87.
- 156.
Johnson, 1993. 23.
- 157.
Jack Undank, 1986. “Diderot and the Phenomenology of the Ordinary” Diderot Studies 22: 143-170, 152.
- 158.
Johnson, 1993. 19.
- 159.
Diderot, Denis. 1757. Entretiens sur le fils naturel in Oeuvres Esthétiques, ed. P. Vernière. Paris: Garnier, 1966. 88: “Un incident imprévu qui se passe en action, et qui change subitement l’état des personnages, est un coup de théâtre”.
- 160.
Bordes, 1983. 59.
- 161.
Diderot, 1757. 88: “Une disposition de ces personnages sur la scène, si naturelle et si vraie, que, rendue fidèlement par un peintre, elle me plairait sur la toile, est un tableau”.
- 162.
Fried, Michael. 1988. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 5. See also Fried, Michel. 1993. David et l’antithéatralité. In David contre David: Actes du colloque organisé au musée du Louvre par le service culturel du 6 au 10 décembre 1989, vol. 1, ed. Régis Michel, 199–227; as well as Fried, Michael. 2015. Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand. New Haven: Yale University Press.
- 163.
- 164.
Watelet, Encyclopédie, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres. Tome 7. [1757] Le Breton 1757. 948: “Je sais que vous pouvez m’objecter que presque toutes les expressions que vous envisagez autour de vous sont ou chargées ou feintes, que presque tout ce qu’on appelle grâce est affectation et grimace… Refléchissez, pénétrez-vous des sujets que vous traitez, descendez en vous-mêmes, et cherchez-y cette naïveté des grâces, cette franchise des passions, que l’intérêt que vous avez à les saisir, vous fera trouver”.
- 165.
Maslan, Susan. 2005. Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 75.
- 166.
Fried 1993. 202. He writes: “Dans les textes que Dideroit écrivit dans les années 1750 et 1760, théâtre et art dramatique deviennent des concepts antithétiques. Le vrai drame exclut le théatre tandis que le moindre soupçon de théâtre tue le drame”.
- 167.
Feilla, 2013. 73.
- 168.
Feilla, 2013. 75–76.
- 169.
Feilla, 2013. 72.
- 170.
Diderot 1757. 153: “Que ce ne sont plus, à proprement parler, les caractères qu’il faut mettre sur la scène, mais les conditions. Jusqu’à present, dans la comédie, le caractère a été l’objet principal, et la condition n’a été que l’accessoire; il faut que la condition devienne aujourd’hui l’objet principal, et que le caractère ne soit que l’accessoire”.
- 171.
Diderot 1757. 153: “Pour peu que le caractère fût chargé, un spectateur pouvait se dire à lui-même, ce n’est pas moi. Mais il ne peut se cacher que l’état qu’on joue devant lui, ne soit le sien”.
- 172.
- 173.
Feilla, 2013. 71.
- 174.
Buckley, 2006. 39–40.
- 175.
Feilla, 2013. 74.
- 176.
Fowler, Alastair. 1982. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982, 175.
- 177.
See, e.g., Victoria Kahn on how Hobbes’ Leviathan as political critique going along with a critique of romance. Kahn, Victoria. 2004. Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- 178.
- 179.
Hunt, 2008. 58.
- 180.
Friedland, 2002. 3.
- 181.
Friedland, 2002. 19.
- 182.
Friedland, 2002. 4, 5.
- 183.
Friedland, 2002. 21. At 22: “Diderot maintained that acting had nothing to do with the presentation of true passions but rather with the abstract or figurative representation of those passions in outward mannerisms”. Buckley, however, writes that “rather than marking a move away from models of metamorphosis to models of imitation, the shift in theatrical aesthetics that took place during the pre-Revolutionary period marked a shift away from a frankly theatrical stage—one that traditionally acknowledged and foregrounded the explicitly fictive quality of theater—to a stage devoted to the effective creation of a realist-illusionist theatre, in which fiction became (or was to become) indistinguishable from life”. Buckley, 2006. 36–37.
- 184.
Friedland, 2002, 23.
- 185.
Friedland, 2002. 23.
- 186.
Friedland, 2002. 23.
- 187.
Friedland, 2002. 60, 61.
- 188.
Friedland, 2002. 61.
- 189.
Friedland, 2002. 30. Kantorowicz provides examples of the King being kept in check by the idea that his sovereignty came from his second body, that one that was truly the body politic incarnate, or to borrow from Elizabethan legal definitions, “consisting of Policy and Government”. Kantorowicz, 1957. 7. He highlights a 1489 interaction between the Parlement de Paris and the King’s council, during which the Parlement claimed to be itself a mystical body representing the King as “sovereign Justice of the Realm of France” to stop the King’s council’s interference. Kantorowicz, 1957. 210–11.
- 190.
Friedland, 2002. 42.
- 191.
Friedland, 2002. 34.
- 192.
Friedland, 2002. 123.
- 193.
Friedland, 2002. 160.
- 194.
Friedland, 2002. 80.
- 195.
Friedland, 2002. 141.
- 196.
Friedland, 2002. 6.
- 197.
Buckley, 2006. 56. At 49–50, Buckley also points to the October Days of 1789 as signaling an important shift: “With startling rapidity, the Revolution’s new leaders found themselves acting not before the limited sphere of informed opinion, an audience apt to sympathize with the Diderotian theater of the Tennis Court, but before a much larger and more diverse audience, and one now informed by a press that was well prepared to critique—and even to try to script—the performance”.
- 198.
Feilla, 2013. 75.
- 199.
Feilla, 2013. 89.
- 200.
- 201.
On the Revolution, melodrama, and the melodramatic body, see Brooks, Peter. 1991. The Revolutionary Body. In Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. Bernadette Fort. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. On how melodrama can dis-charge one from action, see chapter 2 of Robert Meister, 2011. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. New York: Columbia University Press.
- 202.
See in particular chapter 8 of Friedland, 2002 entitled: “Breaching the Fourth Wall: Spectators Storm the Stage, Actors Invade the Audience”.
- 203.
Maslan, Susan. 2005. Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 17.
- 204.
Maslan. 2005. 33.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Mireille Fournier and Spencer Young for their thoughtful help as well as John-Andrew Petrakis for a few early conversations. We are grateful for the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Antaki, M., Le Guerrier, C. (2018). Monument, Portrait, Tableau: Making Sense of and with Jacques-Louis David’s Tennis Court Oath. In: Huygebaert, S., Condello, A., Marusek, S., Antaki, M. (eds) Sensing the Nation's Law. Studies in the History of Law and Justice, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75497-0_2
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