As one of the most important 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 and has become synonymous with new and critical thinking in all aspects of the social milieu. That 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 intellectual and common classes were debating the manner by which people should exist within the world system itself. The Frenchman Rousseau proclaimed that "everything depended fundamentally on politics," yet failed to consider that before political paradigms could exists, the phenomenology within the social and artistic life of the country must take primacy.1
In this sense, it is easy to place various social and artistic activities within the very realm of the political not simply as interpreters of the Enlightenment and resulting revolutionary spirit, but clearly as social indicators and
1 See the Introductory section of Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1984), 1 7. interpretations of thought and culture in their own right. In this sense, one may see art as a way to intermix the revolutionary spirit of the age with important political commentary.2 One of the clearest examples of such a mix is the subject of this paper, the neoclassical painter Jacques Louis David.
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 a...