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- Title
Waxing Revolutionary: Reflections on a Raid on a Waxworks at the Outbreak of the French Revolution.
- Authors
McCALLAM, DAVID
- Abstract
This study focuses on the events of 12 July 1789 which accompanied the people's appropriation of two wax busts (of Necker and the duc d'Orléans) from Curtius's well‐known waxworks show on the boulevard du Temple in Paris. It is, however, less a source‐based, historiographical re‐examination of the early Revolution than an exploration of the cultural and symbolic forces which informed the insurrectionaries who engaged in this half‐funereal, half‐triumphant parade. It considers the socio‐cultural environment which fostered the waxworker's art, not least its passage from a largely medical to a popular spectacle, and also the complementary, and sometimes contradictory, motivations of its audience that were to make waxwork iconography party to acts of political iconoclasm. An eerie symmetry established between the wax busts and the severed heads of the earliest victims of the Revolution in July 1789 suggests how Curtius's art operated in a social and psychological space jointly occupied by the canny entrepreneur and the ‘uncanny’ executioner, in which Real and Symbolic orders were frequently confused.
- Subjects
FRANCE; WAXWORKS; FUNERALS; BUSTS; NOBILITY (Social class) in art; FRENCH Revolution, 1789-1799
- Publication
French History, 2002, Vol 16, Issue 2, p153
- ISSN
0269-1191
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/fh/16.2.153