Protecting Identity: Violence and Its Representations in France, 1815-1830 (original) (raw)

After Napoleon’s final defeat of 1815 and before the beginnings of the second great wave of French colonialism in the 1830’s, during a period of great internal political crisis, French society produced an object called The Death of Sardanapalus. This painting represented what was then a somewhat familiar figure, the “Oriental”, an outsider behaving badly and set to die for it. Based on the mimetic theory, we shall argue that in the relation it determines with its viewers, this painting’s representation of violence is a form of ritualistic activity. Ritualistic activity allows for contained and predictable events of unifying violence against outsiders. Among the effects of the French political conflicts was a crisis in such ritualistic containments. An analysis of the scandals surrounding the works of Géricault and Delacroix and comparisons with Ingres’ more successful forms of containment shall serve to apprehend it.