The Revolutionary Age
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Revolution the term and the mental pictures it engenders are maligned and irreconcilable terms that are used in both the social and physical sciences today. Meaning nothing more than dramatic or drastic change, the term is bandied about with violent connotations that have little to do with the phenomenon itself.1 One of the clearest test cases of the historical term "revolution", and one of the most social events in the modern world, the French Revolution has implications beyond geographic or political boundaries. In fact, the term "Revolutionary Age" has taken on a broader meaning, becoming synonymous with new and critical thinking in all aspects of the social milieu. For some it gave rise to new concepts of man's ability to free himself. Others found only the devastating effects of war and the results of man's inhumanity to man, in the bloody tirades that occurred during the period. While the French Revolutionary period itself has been pegged by many historians as the period from 1789 to 1799, the term Revolutionary Age is far broader and may be extended back into the past to 1760 and forward to the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The age itself, however, must be looked upon as a product of the Enlightenment, in which more and more of both the 1 See Richard Luttwak, Coup d'Etat, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 19 28. intellectual and common classes were debating the manner by which people should exist within
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rdinary citizens which are used like cannon fodder. In fact, Goya has been very strongly associated in the artistic world with the country villages (the Pueblo) of Spain.7
Jacques Louis David was born in 1748, well in the throes of the Age of Absolutism. David was not only an artist, but an ardent revolutionary, and a Jacobian friend of the radical politician Robespierre. He had been radicalized politically by the extreme polarization of the social and artistic life in France before the 1789 revolution, and joined the intellectuals of his day in petitioning the new revolutionary government to abolish the old patronage system of art. This in fact, would involve removing the French Royal Academy, and placing a group of experts, albeit with revolutionary sympathies, with the authority to redefine artistic temperament.8
David's revolutionary spirit and "desire to free the common man" led to a willingness to use the French Revolution to create an art for the public, and yet, at the same time, an art of propaganda to move the public. David particularly liked the traditions of Greek art, and believed that the heroic patterns engendered by it would have the strongest impact on the senses. He believed the popular Rococo to be both
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Approximate Word count = 2483
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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